It’s hard to forget the cacophonous bleeps, fuzz and buzz of our modem logging onto AOL in our pre-teen years. An exciting, confusing time when popular use of the internet was dawning, but so frustrating was that noisy wait to discover whether or not we had mail. There are few things we could hate so much as a kid but…
Influence is a funny thing. One never can tell just who will sway them to try the latest shoe style, iphone case, or say, social media app. There is an easy answer of course: celebrities. Who doesn’t want to rock the same styles as their favorite pop artist or movie star. But the time may be coming for celebrity influence,…
Merging our Media-Tech world to see it “through the eyes of our friends” Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was the last great book recommendation I got. This is a nostalgia shot, people, because that sentiment is a double-whammy two-for of things that just don’t happen anymore: paper-page book reading, and getting recommendations directly from another person. Now, don’t get…
Is Facebook losing its hold on the younger generations? Like the OJ verdict and the Clinton-Lewinski scandal, I’ll never forget where I was the first time my mom friend-requested me on Facebook. There was bellyaching, groaning, and any number of other visceral reactions to the same moment in time. We all experienced it – our parents finally, inevitably intruding on…
There’s a new search engine in town. As online technology spins intricate webs of capability, catering to uses both corporate and individual, testing daily the bounds of design and usability while arranging opportunities for users (and advertisers) to gain footing in a still-evolving frontier, it’s easy to get caught up in the glamour of little things. While a recipe on…
Marty McFly, 1955: “Yeah, you know we have two.” He is referring of course to the number of TV sets in his 1985 household, amazing his teenage uncle whose family just got their first. Marty goes back, of course, to the future, but I’m sure his uncle would be even more amazed by a report recently put out by Nielsen…
Facebook weather service reports a clear, dry day with record lows! Good news, right? It’s so nice not having to check weatherbug to see if we need to don a coat or umbrella for our morning commute. Depending on how status-savvy our friends are, we usually have at least one or two in our news feed describing how high the…
“OMG Walking Dead!” Yes, that was the most common post in my Facebook Newsfeed during the last airing of the hit AMC show. The hit show that I’ve never watched. But maybe now I will – a 500-friend recommendation is not too shabby. But the focus in a report recently put out by Nielsen on the climate of social media…
It is Thanksgiving eve. I stand daydreaming in a long line at the grocery store, and am suddenly yanked from my pre-holiday reverie when I notice the person being checked out is playing with his phone. His phone! In line! Egregious. Inconsiderate. Unacceptably rude to hold up a line because you can’t put your phone away. But just before I…
Here is the second part of a study we conducted with Nickelodeon & Insight Research Group that was featured in Nickeldeon’s Kaleidoscope in Kidscreen™ magazine. The topic of this study was “Kids, Teens, and Social Media”. It’s commonly accepted that the presence of social media has exploded online in the last few years and has quickly become a fixture in…