cybersoc.com

online dating market - down in US, up in EU

isJupiter Research has released the results of two studies of the online dating industry.

While the online dating market in the US appears to have saturated, with the value of the market actually declining by 1% in 2005, the European market increased by 43% in 2005. That's less than in 2004, when the European online dating market increased by 80%, but there is still significant room for growth: whilst in America 20% of internet users used dating sites, only 4% in Europe did.

The author of the studies told BBC News Online that social networking and community sites like myspace "don't have the tools or the right audience" to help people find a date (Instead, he points to high subscription charges as the key barrier to users becoming members.)

Really?! So posting a photo, having a profile, joining groups and finding other users who share your interests, making friends, meeting up with other users, etc - none of that helps people find a date? Sure, it doesn't say "online dating" at the top of myspace or flickr or craigslist but the tools are there and surely people are using them.

No matter how many times we hear about a couple meeting on an online dating website, or read industry press releases telling us how normal it is to meet on one, the fact of the matter is that many still feel there is a stigma attached to online dating sites. Less so for online community and social networking sites where dating does happen but more discreetly - and it's those users who aren't quite sure about online dating, but who are at ease with sharing content and being a part of online communities, that dating sites need to attract to continue the market growth of recent years.

nielsonnetratings research: popularity of community sites

Recently published research by Nielsen/NetRatings suggest that over half the UK internet population visits "online member communities" in any given month. Friends Reunited comes top of the list, followed by Blogger, Bebo, MySpace and Genes Reunited.

I reckon the list doesn't give as clear a picture as it could because many online communities are likely to fall outside Nielsen's definition of "member communities" - for example the BBC or some of the football club websites. The research also probably misses sites like gumtree which have, so far, fallen beneath the radar of most studies like this but which are hugely popular. Still, it might come in useful if you're trying to sell online community to client to be able to tell them that almost 1.8 billion community content pages were served up in the UK each month - that's 57 million a day (equal to one per member of population!).

craigslist accused of violating housing laws

A federal lawsuit filed in Chicago last week accuses the online site Craigslist of violating fair housing laws by publishing discriminatory classified ads. The lawsuit, filed by a group of lawyers working to enforce and gain awareness for civil rights, alleges that Craigslist broke the law by publishing 100 ads that violated the federal Fair Housing Act. The ads are said to exclude prospective buyers or tenants on the basis of race, gender or religion.

According to CNN, several Internet law experts said the suit seems likely to fail, citing a 1996 federal law that says an online service provider isn't considered a publisher or a speaker when it merely passes along information provided by someone else.

free flickr pro account - reminder

Just a reminder that I'm giving away a free flickr pro account to a cybersoc.com reader on Valentines day.

Yes, it really truly is free and you have to do almost nothing at all for your chance to win. I, on the other hand, have to write all the names of entrants on little bits of paper, put those names into a hat or other suitable receptical, shake vigorously, blindfold myself, then choose a lucky winner without losing my balance and falling over. All that effort just to make one person very happy and a whole bunch of other people really sad...

Full details here but you don't have long to enter!

seen a BBC dj on myspace recently?

A colleague of mine pointed out that several of the BBC's Radio One DJ's (including Jo Whiley, Chris Moyles, Huw Stephens, and Bethan Elfyn) have profiles on myspace.

Ok, so the comments on their profiles look a bit like billboards due to all the advertisements, but using third party services in this way is an interesting experiment. Micro-managing user generated content, and providing platforms for it, is horrendously expensive and is rapidly becoming unsustainable for many media organisations.

Using third party services, like myspace, or simply linking to groups created by users of services, could allow media organisations to continue to engage with their audiences without the cost and risks of moderation, discussion hosting, development time, bandwidth, etc.

But, as the screenshot of a comment from Jo Whiley's myspace profile demonstrates, there are risks too. The user who commented is joking but what if she wasn't? Who, if anyone, would owe her a duty of care? How would they discharge that duty of care? There are other problems too - who, for example, owns the myspace profiles above? Who is ultimately responsible for them? These are just some of the issues that any organisation seeking to offload their user communities onto third party services will need to figure out.

(Update: A page purporting to be that of Chris Moyles, which was set up by a unknown person or persons, was redirected earlier today to a porn site. Oops!)

Folksonomy: research on tagging

This morning I came across two interesting studies on tagging:

Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags? By Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin

A social analysis of tagging (or how tagging transforms the solitary browsing experience into a social one) by Rashmi Sinha

(what's tagging? see this cybersoc.com post)

message board rent-a-friends talk up brand

When giving workshops about how to start an online community, I often suggest that sites "seed" their online discussions before public launch. There's nothing wrong with doing a bit of seeding. When users arrive immediately following launch it ensures that your community is being used, that the first users have discussions to get involved in, and that users have behaviour to model their own participation upon. Opening an online community to the public without conversations is a bit like opening a new nightclub without music, design, or people - and as anyone who has ever arrived at a nightclub before anyone else, it's not exactly the way to entice people to come back. So the idea of seeding, as advocated by myself and other online community managers I know, is to invite friends, family, and other potentially interested parties to participate if they want to. That way you get users you can trust to help you start the community whilst, at the same time, not damaging your credibility with the public.

Thankfully, I've never personally sunk to the level of community owners pretending to be punters although I know it happens and have seen it happen. Pretending to be a user whilst interacting with other users is deceitful and potentially harmful, not just to the trust a user has in you and your brand, but potentially harmful to them as a person. Imagine building a relationship with someone, thinking that they're your friend, then realising that the person had actually been "pretending" all along and is in fact a paid employee of the website. Not a nice feeling, is it?

That was part of the issue with the whole Match.com Autumn Marzec date bait story a few months back. Now it's alleged that technology company, Nvidia, has been caught paying "message board sock puppets" to befriend message board users and then talk up the brand. The story, spotted on Consumerist.com by Boing Boing is that:

Nvidia stands accused of hiring online actors to create dozens of personae in online forums, where they won gamers' trust by talking about subjects unrelated to Nvidia's products, and then splurged in an orgy of sock-puppet boosterism of Nvidia's stuff.

(sock monkey image from here)

top search terms for january

As I've explained in previous months, the point of having google ads (and search) on cybersoc.com is to try to pay for the hosting of the old cybersoc content and the typepad account used by this blog. The two services cost £18.75 per month. In December the google ads on cybersoc.com generated US $51.13 (£29.72) so there was a net profit of £11.

In January, the google ads generated $41.40 (£23.27) in revenue, a profit of £4.52.

A couple of weeks ago I announced that I was intending to use the profits from December and January to offer readers the opportunity to win a free flickr pro account The contest closes on 14 February.

I've also reduced the number of google ads on the site from 4 to 2. I hope to be able to further reduce this as traffic grows and enables me to break even with fewer ads. If you really have a problem with the ads, you can always subscribe to the rss feed.

Now for the moderately interesting bit, the top search terms of the month of January on cybersoc.com (I've removed obvious attempts to skew results):

search term	#	%
---- attempt to skew results ---	19	5.249%
cybersex	19	5.249%
adult chat rooms	16	4.420%
ultimas descbertas sobre cibernetica	5	1.381%
---- attempt to skew results ---	5	1.381%
what is sociology	4	1.105%
jobs	4	1.105%
e. Reid 2004	4	1.105%
ethnographic research	4	1.105%
virtual community	4	1.105%
moderation and hosting who what	3	0.829%
cybersex sites	3	0.829%
male sex cordons	3	0.829%
sex	3	0.829%
orgia	3	0.829%
what things so sociologist study	3	0.829%
depression	3	0.829%
IRANXXX	3	0.829%
Elisabeth Reid Text based realities 2004	3	0.829%
mud pies versus video games	2	0.552%
children 1999 versus children 1980	2	0.552%
definition: sociology	2	0.552%
free cybersex	2	0.552%
---- bot---	2	0.552%
bernard gilpin comp	2	0.552%

Conf: EU Safer Internet Day 2006 (07 Feb)

The Home Office, Ofcom and InternetSafetyZone.co.uk have organised a one day conference (Tues 07 Feb in London) to help the UK internet industry protect children online.

Speakers include Dr. Rachel O'Connell (Univ. of Lancashire), Dr. Jo Twist (IPPR), John Carr (NCH) as well as representatives from the BBC, Samaritans, eModeration, WiseKids and more. Shame registration for such an important event costs £100...

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flickr the photo agency?

I got a message on flickr today from the Director of Contributor Relations at NowPublic.com. It would seem that NowPublic, a site that publishes articles, photos and videos submitted by "citizen journalists" is now actively approaching content producers and encouraging them to participate on the site. I'm not surprised - a few months ago I wrote about how non-profit organisations and grassroots campaigners could use flickr to get the word out about their work.

I just wonder how long it's going to be before flickr comes up with a tool that allows news and media organisations to search for, and purchase, photographs from users (?). Not only would a functionality like that probably kill off the start-ups like scoopt, it would probably also have a serious impact on the stock photo industry that churns out CD's and online databases full of photos. Not that I necessarily think commercialisation of member photos on flickr is a good thing - I'm not sure what the impact would be, good or bad.