"All right men, let's find that bloody Blog."
Posted on 09/28/2005 8:10:05 AM PDT by Milhous
LONDON (Reuters) - Proponents of the latest Web trends were warned Tuesday that the rest of the world may not have a clue what they are talking about.
A survey of British taxi drivers, pub landlords and hairdressers -- often seen as barometers of popular trends -- found that nearly 90 percent had no idea what a podcast is and more than 70 percent had never heard of blogging.
"When I asked the panel whether people were talking about blogging, they thought I meant dogging," said Sarah Carter, the planning director at ad firm DDB London.
Dogging is the phenomenon of watching couples have sex in semi-secluded places such as out-of-town car parks. News of such events are often spread on Web sites or by using mobile phone text messages.
More people (56 percent) understood the phrase "happy slapping" -- a teenage craze that involves assaulting people while capturing it on video with their mobile phones -- than podcasting (12 percent) or blogging (28 percent).
"Our research not only shows that there is no buzz about blogging and podcasting outside of our media industry bubble, but also that people have no understanding of what the words mean," Carter said. "It's a real wake-up call."
A blog, short for Web log, is an online journal, while podcasting is a method of publishing audio programs over the Internet -- a name derived from combining iPod, Apple's popular digital music player, with broadcasting, even though portable devices are not necessary to listen to a podcast.
DDB, a unit of New York-based advertising group Omnicom, said the survey results indicate that agencies may be pushing their clients to use new technology -- that is, to advertise on the new media formats -- too quickly.
"We spend too much time talking to ourselves in this industry, rather than getting out there and finding out what's really going on in the world," DDB's chief strategy officer David Hackworthy said.
Life after Television
The very nature of broadcasting, however, means that television cannot cater to the special interests of audiences dispersed across the country. Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar, it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns. All of world industry is moving increasingly toward more segmented markets. But in a broadcast medium, such a move would be a commercial disaster. In a broadcast medium, artists and writers cannot appeal to the highest aspirations and sensibilities of individuals. Instead, manipulative masters rule over huge masses of people.
...
The central message of Life After Television for the film industry is that the new technologies are targeted directly at Hollywood. Today some 70 percent of the costs of a film go to distribution and advertising. In every industry -- from retailing to insurance -- the key impact of the computer-networking revolution is to collapse the costs of distribution and remove the middlemen. In an information industry such as the movie business, distribution costs will predictably plummet.
Perhaps the British are falling behind the tech curve.
I've heard of blogging. Dogging, OTOH, is news to me.
How many UK homes have Internet connected computers? I would bet that in a country that requires a costly license to own a TV set, the cost of Internet access as well as computers make them beyond the reach of many homes.
LOL! Love the tagline.
LOL! They might be barometers of popular trends, but they aren't exactly at the top of the heap on technology issues. Surveys are only as good as the survey method.....
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