Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

The Age today features an article written by Katie Cincotta called Dude, where’s my audience? on Gen Ys switching off traditional media. In the story Simon comments on how media has changed and how young audiences are skipping the traditional habits of free-to-air TV, live radio and CDs in favour of content they can access anytime, anywhere - courtesy of the internet.

And this any time anywhere model is also much more difficult to measure because it’s more spread out and new habits such as media multi-tasking like keeping one eye on the TV and the other on the laptop have yet to be seriously tracked.

Read the full story in The Age.

Interesting story in The Australian last week on predictions of traditional TV as we know it being rendered obsolete by the Internet and P2P.

This article supports much of what we wrote about in our April article, ipTV. Simon also discussed the emergence of ipTV with marketing and technology writer and journalist, Brad Howarth. This conversation is available for download from the HotHouse blog as a podcast. - the death of couch potatoes as we know them

This month’s podcast features Simon in conversation with independent software architect, Phil Haynes, who highlights the key benefits for businesses operating in the Web 2.0 environment and the change in mindset required. Phil argues that the biggest challenge of Web 2.0 development is “to put your entire website in your users’ hands.”

You can listen to the full conversation by downloading the HotHouse podcast on Web 2.0 development.

According to a survey conducted at this year’s Internet World conference in London, 60% of businesses (at least the ones who attend Internet conferences) are actively using Web 2.0 technologies in their business.

Despite recent criticism that Web 2.0 is all marketing spin, the survey by NetBenefit found there is real substance to the new technologies being deployed such as blogs, Ajax and mash-ups, with 69% of companies disagreeing that Web 2.0 is just hype.

The results also revealed that Web 2.0 is seen as a natural progression in the usage of Internet technology with 83% agreeing that it is an online ‘evolution’ rather than a radical change in the way we use the World Wide Web.

Have you ever seen a Wim Wenders movie. They are boring and incomprehensible. Even Bono a friend of Wim’s said “Nice guy but he makes boring movies.” If you talk to movie buffs they all say Wim Wenders movies are “Important”. Mmmmm

Why the Wim Wenders analogy? Well I think Second Life falls into the same category. So few people truly get the point that is has to be important.

Here are my issues with Second Life.

1. Remember 1997 when a few chat services started and instead of using straight IRC you could interact in a 3D world with a custom created avatar. It was cool for a week and then you realised IRC was more interesting and this stuff just got in the way. There are a lot of registered users of Second Life but low levels of real engagement. It seems to me the numbers of regular users drops dramatically, last time I looked there was around 2,000,000 world wide and a handful in Australia. There are nearly 9 million Australians registered to play sport, that’s an important number, the second life numbers are not.

2. Lots of organisations have built marketing areas on SL. I am pretty sure the only value of these marketing areas is the PR value and the fact that in the rush to get these areas online many small businesses have sprung up delivering these services. They are all, it seems, giving the work away and large organisations are getting to experiment at a cost that matches the biscuits budget. So why not see what happens? You can’t lose but once this initial rush is over I’m not sure who cares. And have you tried a virtual Coke - exciting stuff - drink a real one!

3. You can run seminars and symposiums in Second Life . But why going to a seminar or meeting as an avatar is a good idea is beyond me. People have been running these types of meetings for years using a range of tools. Webcasting, Netmeeting, IRC - these are important and they have shaped the internet and our usage and expectations. Second Life just makes this harder to get too.

4. You can meet people and make new friends - you can do this on dating sites, you can use Flickr, Facebook, Yahoo Groups, My Space for this. These sites have huge numbers of highly engaged users. They have all been important because they all deliver a critical mass of users, they are useful as well as entertaining. While I might not see Second Life as entertaining I accept some people might, but it’s not useful and that’s always been the Internet kiss of death.

5. It’s for young people they get it. I did a market study of three, my kids. The youngest said Second Life was boring because “all you could do was fly around and build shit”. MMOGs are important, they aggregate a huge audience, they have driven a huge industry around content and advertising they are fun and they have spawned a real world community.

6. It’s had a lot of TV coverage so it must be important. I am sure this is just because they don’t get it either. Yes, there are some people making money off the side of SL but who really cares. eBay has helped hundreds of thousands of people build online businesses, Google adwords and adsense has helped many bloggers generate a real income. Second Life is just a distraction. The fact that people are having sex on SL seems to have attracted a lot of interest. Cybersex was a big thing ten years ago. TV, radio and press covered the topic many times and a few people had their 15 minutes of fame. Cybersex was at least fun once or twice, the third you could not escape the fact you were typing smut into a computer. SL is one step worse. It’s just plain silly, there is no imagination or fantasy - one day these people will be old enough to meet real women and cancel the subscription.

So I’m a sceptic. Eventually it’ll be another speed hump in the history of the internet.