Digital Bytes

IOC allowing Olympic highlights on YouTube

Source: Techdigest

Believe it or not, and after lots of hype - good and bad - the Olympics starts tomorrow...and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced that it will be showing news and sports highlights from the Beijing Olympics in countries where no broadcaster has exclusive rights. The Video on Demand service will be available on a YouTube channel.

That means some 75 countries, including India and Nigeria, will be able to watch the best bits of the Games, as determined by the IOC. The channel will be "geo-blocked" so that those of us in countries where a TV broadcaster is already showing coverage of the Games won't be able to access the YouTube footage.

Since the BBC will be near-exhaustively covering the Games, official YouTube clips won't be available in the UK..but it means that for the first time in Olympic history they will have complete global online coverage - so now you know where to go to catch up on all the Olympic news if you're out of the country for any reason!

Click here to read the whole article

Tween research

Source: Chiefmarketer.com

We don't often come across research on tweens (10-14 year olds) but DoubleClick Performics have just released their findings on tweens' online search and purchase behaviors across 10 different product categories.  Main learnings were:

• Tweens consume information through many channels, but the Internet leads:  When asked how much time they spent with various media types, 83% said they spend at least an hour per day online, and 68% reported at least an hour per day watching TV. Radio, magazines and newspapers came in much lower with 29%, 10% and five percent indicating they spent an hour per day with these channels.
• Nearly half of respondents go online many times per day (more than three), and 87% usually spend at least a half hour each time. Looking closer at this time spent online, the survey found:
  · 72% have a profile on at least one social networking site
  · 54% have a MySpace profile
  · 35% have a Facebook profile
  · 45% have some other social networking profile
  · 64% visit social networking sites at least once per day
  · 34% spend four or more hours per week on social networking sites
• Tweens reported varying levels of involvement across product categories, but apparel was the most popular: On average, tweens shopped for apparel 8.2 times over the past six months.
• Other popular product categories for tweens included electronics (4.5 times) and home furnishings (4.4 times).

Click here to find out more

Web speeds to increase 10 fold?

Source: BBC Click

Most of you would have noticed your online consumption change over the last few years, from it being purely text based to more video based with the rise of YouTube and on demand services.  This is leading to more and more pressure on bandwiths and with more people going online and consuming more content, the internet can't really carry on as it currently stands.  Well, good news is on its way as researchers have come up with a way to solve all this, click here to find out how this is all going to be possible and how wireless and mobile internet could also look like in the future.

Google, Knol and SEO

So, after Google's 'Knol' was announced at the end of last year, it finally launched in beta on the 23rd July.  For those of you who haven't heard about it, it's basically Google's version of Wikipedia; with differences including that all contributors to the Knol project must sign in first with a Google account and are supposed to state their real names.  If permission is given, Google will check the veracity of the name information by credit card or phone. Google believes that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.  Another point of differnce is that whilst Wikipedia articles are written collectively under a "neutral point of view" policy, Knol will highlight personal expertise by emphasizing authorship and will contain the personal opinions of the author.

More information and more opinion on more topics must surely be a good thing...however, there has been debate on whether Google search results can remain neutral because of possible conflict of interest - what's to stop Google from ranking Knol results high up on the SEO listings and remain unbiased?  Now that it has launched, these concerns seem to have become reality, and this mashable article highlights the issues quite well...it remains to be seen how the SEO landscape on Google will change once Knol is out of beta and at full capacity.

Source: Wikipedia, mashable