THE CREATIVE LEGACY

A research note written by a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern that described his friends' media habits has generated a flurry of interest from media executives and investors.

The Financial Times reported today that the US investment bank's European media analysts asked Matthew Robson, an intern from a London school, to write a report on teenagers' likes and dislikes.

His report, that dismissed Twitter and described online advertising as pointless, proved to be "one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen – so we published it", said Edward Hill-Wood, head of Morgan Stanley's European media team.

"We've had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day." He said the note had generated five or six times more responses than the team's usual research.

The rapid surge of interest in social networking and messaging sites has prompted speculation that sites such as Twitter or Facebook could be taken over. But Robson's report suggested that such a move could be folly. He said teenagers were using more and more media, but they were unwilling to pay for it.

"Teenagers do not use Twitter," he wrote. "They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless."

Robson warned that traditional media – television, radio and newspapers – are losing ground as his peers prefer listening to advert-free music on websites such as Last.fm to traditional radio. Even online, teens find advertising "extremely annoying and pointless".

Time and money are instead devoted to cinema, concerts and video game consoles, which he said have emerged as a more popular choice for chatting with friends than the phone.

No teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper since most "cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text," preferring summaries on the internet or on television.

His report came as media moguls gathered at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. This annual event is a chance for the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to discuss the latest business and technology issues in a relaxed atmosphere.

When interviewed at the event, Murdoch appeared to rule out making a bid for the micro-blogging site Twitter. Asked if he was considering buying Twitter, Murdoch said, "No." Asked about selling MySpace, he replied, "Hell no."

(Courtesy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/13/twitter-teenage-media-habits)

The other morning, I clicked on an upgrade button for Winamp. Generally, I like the program, it seems to load faster than Media Player, and doesn't bother me too much. In the afternoon, I did a search by typing in the address bar of Firefox. Normally, this type of search brings me to the Google results of the phrase, but this time it brought me to the Winamp results of the search term. Grrrr. Winamp hijacked my search bar.

This wasn't the first time that this had happened, a few months ago, I encountered a similar phenomenon while looking for a way to convert the .3gp files that come from the audio recorder on the G1 to .mp3, .wav or just about any other format that can be used on a standard player.

As it turns out, Winamp hijacked three settings from my browser. Bad software....sit.....stay.... I successfully changed the location bar search, the search bar in the upper right, and my home page. Here's how:

• Open up a new tab


• type about:config in the location bar and press enter


• You may see a warning message that discourages you from going further. Make your choice and live with it.


• In the filter field, type keyword. As you type it, fewer values will be listed below


• The one you are looking for is keyword.URL


• The value I like is: http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q= Which searches google and returns the result. You can also have it search through other vendors, and return different amounts of info.


• When you close it, the settings should be changed.


• Test it with the term of your choice to make sure it is working properly.

Home page: This one I didn't notice until later. It's also pretty straightforward. Go to the EDIT menu, choosepreferences, then go to the MAIN section. Home page should be up in the top third of the window. Below it are a couple of buttons, including Use Current Pages. That one can be a pain, because every time you hit the Home button, it will load all the tabs you have open currently. If you are addicted to tabs, this will really send you over the edge with a zillion tabs open in no time at all. It is easier to just pick the one page that you want to be your home page, and go from there.

This process should work for Mozilla-based browsers. What are your favorite tricks with web browsers?

(Courtesy: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/07/how-to_reclaim_your_hijacked_search_ba.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890)

The small Australian town of Bundanoon just set a new standard for sustainability by voting to do what no community has ever done before: ban bottled water! The measure was founded over concerns about the tremendous amount of resources used to extract, package, and transport bottled water, and it passed nearly unanimously in a town hall meeting. Will this be the beginning of a trend?

Although Bundanoon is a small community of about 2,500 residents, the decision to ban bottled water sets a great example for towns and cities around the world. The decision to ban bottled water began as a response to the desire of a bottling company to extract water from the town, take it to Sydney, and bring it back to the town to sell it. After the town learned of the environmental impacts of this cycle they decided to do something about it.

All the shops in the town agreed to the measure, and now instead of bottled water the town will install filtered water fountains so that people can fill their reusable bottles free of charge. The shops will sell these reusable containers to visitors coming to the town.

(Courtesy: http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/07/09/australian-town-bans-bottled-water/ )

Urine-powered cars, homes and personal electronic devices could be available in six months with new technology developed by scientists from Ohio University.

Using a nickel-based electrode, the scientists can create large amounts of cheap hydrogen from urine that could be burned or used in fuel cells. "One cow can provide enough energy to supply hot water for 19 houses," said Gerardine Botte, a professor at Ohio University developing the technology. "Soldiers in the field could carry their own fuel."

Pee power is based on hydrogen, the most common element in the universe but one that has resisted efforts to produce, store, transport and use economically.

Storing pure hydrogen gas requires high pressure and low temperature. Newnanomaterials with high surface areas can adsorb hydrogen, but have yet to be produced on a commercial scale.

Chemically binding hydrogen to other elements, like oxygen to create water, makes it easier to store and transport, but releasing the hydrogen when it's needed usually requires financially prohibitive amounts of electricity.

By attaching hydrogen to another element, nitrogen, Botte and her colleagues realized that they can store hydrogen without the exotic environmental conditions, and then release it with less electricity, 0.037 Volts instead of the 1.23 Volts needed for water.

One molecule of urea, a major component of urine, contains four atoms of hydrogen bonded to two atoms of nitrogen. Stick a special nickel electrode into a pool of urine, apply an electrical current, and hydrogen gas is released.

Botte's current prototype measures 3x3x1 inch and can produce up to 500 milliwatts of power. However, Botte and her colleagues are actively trying to commercialize several larger versions of the technology.

A fuel cell, urine-powered vehicle could theoretically travel 90 miles per gallon. A refrigerator-sized unit could produce one kilowatt of energy for about $5,000, although this price is a rough estimate, says Botte.

"The waste products from say a chicken farm could be used to produce the energy needed to run the farm," said John Stickney, a chemist and professor at the University of Georgia.

For livestock farmers who are required by law to pool their animals' waste, large scale prototypes could turn that urine into power within six months.

Smaller versions likely won't be available until after that, so the average consumer probably shouldn't start saving their pee just yet.

"It is not a solution for all our cars," said Stickney, "but it is the kind of process which will find many applications and will make for a greener world."

(Courtesy: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/07/08/urine-power.html)

Last month a social media analytics provider named Sysomos released a comprehensive report on Twitter usage. The problem with most analysis on Twitter, though, is that it is limited by the minimal amount of data that Twitter collects. So, to fill the gaps, most reports do things like guessing gender based on real names or pulling data from keywords in people's biographic information. This often yields some questionable results - and the Sysomos report is not immune to this (for example, they find that 65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25, but base this on only the 0.7% of users who actually disclose their age).

Looking past these small points, the report does share some fairly interesting observations and stats as well if you dig a bit deeper. Here's my read on the 10 standout conclusions that the report offers to help you (and your brand) better understand the potential uses of Twitter:

1. 21% (One Fifth) of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders. These are the percentage of Twitter accounts that have never posted a single tweet. They may either be registered simply to hold a username for later use, or be experimental accounts started up but never used.
2. Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers. In a finding perhaps consistent with the newness of the tool as well as the fact that many people may currently have an account simply to start experimenting with the tool, Sysomos found the vast majority of Twitter users have an extremely low followership.
3. March and April of 2009 were the tipping point for Twitter. During these months, Ashton Kutcher launched his quest to get to 1 million followers faster than CNN, Oprah started using Twitter, and the steady flow of new users to the site continued. For many, it offered a safer and easier way to get their feet wet with social media, 140 characters at a time.
4. 150 followers is the magic number. In a particularly interesting data point from the survey, Sysomos found that Twitter users tended to "follow back" all their followers up until about 150 connections. Then the reciprocation rate fell off dramatically, which seems to indicate that this number may be the crossover point where people shift from using Twitter for more personal use to using it more for "lifecasting" their thoughts and actions to a community of people who they feel varying levels of connection to.
5. A small minority creates most of the activity. A steep curve of a small minority of actively engaged content creators generating most of the activity on a site is common among social networks, but it is steeper and more pronounced on Twitter. 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, and 10% of users account for 86%. This seems to suggest that the site has managed to engage a mass audience beyond those who typically engage with social media.
6. Half of all Twitter users are not "active." If you take a general description of being "active" on Twitter to mean that you have posted a tweet at some point in the last 7 days (1 week), then the survey learned that 50.4% of all Twitter users fit this category. If you remove the 21% from point #1, this leaves about 30% of users who have an account and have tweeted before, but happen to be inactive now.
7. Tuesday is the most active Twitter day. One of the most useful data points from the report is that it clears up the common question of which day of the week is the best day to tweet something. Sysomos found that Tuesday stood out as the most popular day for tweets and retweets, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.
8. APIs have been the key to Twitter's growth & utility. In terms of tools that people are using for Twitter, Sysomos found that more than half (55%) of all Twitter users use something other than Twitter.com to tweet, search and connect with others. This may, in part, be due to Twitter's notorious reputation of failing/crashing, but also is a credit to all the third party applications that have been built on top of Twitter and do their fair share to bring new users to the service.
9. English still dominates Twitter. When exploring Russia as part of a class that I am teaching this summer at Georgetown, one of the barriers we learned about was the difficulty of fitting some Russian language words into just 140 characters. Twitter is, however, extremely English-friendly. As the Sysomos report found, the top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter? Brazil with 2%.
10. Twitter is being led by the social media geeks. This particular finding should likely come as no surprise, but 15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as social media marketers. These individuals are more likely to post updates every day (sometimes more than once per day) and also use Twitter more actively for direct communication.

Bonus Geographical Stat/Quote: "The cities with the biggest Twitter populations are New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, and Boston. Los Angeles is the fastest growing city on the list."

(Courtesy: http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2009/07/10-stunning-and-useful-stats-about-twitter.html )