UK audiences saw more adverts between January and June than in same period last year, according to figures from ratings measurement company Barb.

In the first half of 2008, UK viewers watched 2.4 billion broadcast TV ads a day – a 6% rise on 2007.

Figures show people watch three hours and 46 minutes of broadcast TV a day, seven minutes more than a decade ago.

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7555739.stm

“…while the growth in new users in North America is beginning to level off, it is burgeoning in other regions around the world. During the past year, the total North American audience of social networkers has grown 9 percent compared to a much larger 25 percent growth for the world at large. The Middle East-Africa region (up 66 percent), Europe (up 35 percent), and Latin America (up 33 percent) have each grown at well-above average rates.”

More: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2396

Don’t be taken in by videos of mobile phones apparently popping corn.

Bluetooth headset retailer Cardo Systems has claimed ownership of the hot viral videos that show people appearing to pop popcorn with their cellphones.

In a video posted to YouTube on Wednesday titled “Cellphone Popcorn Mystery Resolved,” an advert for the company’s line of headsets follows the grainy footage of friends aiming phones at uncooked corn that’s been tallying millions of views on YouTube.

More: http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/06/bluetooth-compa.html

And those original videos:

It started as a student assignment and it is now a worldwide film sensation.

The short film, the “Italian Spiderman”, was devised by students at Flinders University in South Australia. On the internet the film has attracted almost two million hits in just over five months.

Now it has attracted the attention of the South Australian Film Corporation, which will give the students funding to make ten more of the short films, as Nance Haxton reports from Adelaide.

Expect to hear a lot more about Italian Spiderman over the coming weeks.

More info: http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2008/s2269067.htm

MP3 news report: http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/news/audio/twt/200806/20080609twt10-italian-spiderman.mp3

To be honest, that’s kind of beside the point. Authentic or not, it demonstrates the enormous traffic opportunities available to creative folk tapping into video sharing sites.

For the record, both boyfriend and girlfriend work in advertising – their company’s website is here and its YouTube channel is here.

The world wide web is “still in its infancy”, the web’s inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has told BBC News.

He was speaking ahead of the 15th anniversary of the day the web’s code was put into the public domain by Cern, the lab where the web was developed.

The future web will put “all the data in the world” at the fingertips of every user, Sir Tim said.

“The web has been a tremendous tool for people to do a lot of good even though you can find bad stuff out there.”

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7371660.stm

Often publishers ask us why Google News didn’t include one of their articles, or skipped the image associated with an article. In the search for answers, we’ve noticed that there’s a lot of confusion about how we include and rank articles. We’d like to share some of the facts, and debunk the myths.

The quick-read version:

Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH

Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE

Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking MYTH

Articles that are just images or video won’t be included TRUE

There’s no way to see why my articles weren’t included in Google News MYTH

Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings MYTH

Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News TRUE

If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve MYTH

More: http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/psstsecrets-of-google-news-exposed.html

UK Internet traffic to online video websites increased by 178% between February 2007 and 2008. A Hitwise custom category of the top 25 video websites in the UK accounted for 2.22% of all UK Internet visits in February 2008, equivalent for one in every 45 Internet visits last month.

YouTube is the most popular video site in the UK and the eighth most visited website overall. The combined market share of its US and UK properties in February was 69.31% of all UK Internet visits to the custom category.

The third most visited video website in the UK during February was BBC iPlayer. The Beeb’s catch-up TV streaming service has increased its market share of UK Internet visits by 423% since December 2007, and is now the 50th most visited website in the UK overall.

More: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/03/online_video_traffic_up_178_in_a_year.html

A few weeks ago I said the recent dropin UK traffic to Facebook was not significant as it had happened over the Christmas break. According to 95% of the British media this view was wrong and the fall heralded the end of the social networking roller-coaster as we know it.

Today Hitwise reportsthat Facebook’s market share of UK Internet visits last week (w/e 22 March 2008) was equal to its previous record high of 2.16% during the Christmas week (w/e 29 December 2007)

I hate to say I told you so…

More: http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/03/25/facebooks-not-dead-it-was-just-resting/

Key findings include (taken from comScore’s summary):

·          The U.S. now accounts for 21 percent of Internet users worldwide.  While growth in the number of Internet users in the U.S. has slowed, several Asian and Eastern European countries continue to add new users at a rapid rate.

·          Google is the dominant search brand in most countries, including most of Europe and Latin America, with a few significant exceptions — countries where Chinese, Korean, and Russian languages dominate.

·          Chinese language search engine Baidu currently ranks #3 in worldwide search market share, behind Google and Yahoo!

·          The number of worldwide visitors to social networking sites has grown 34 percent in the past year to 530 million, representing approximately 2 out of every 3 Internet users. MySpace and Facebook are in a tight battle for the global leadership position, each attracting more than 100 million visitors per month.

·          Online video has become the dominant online entertainment format, led by the global popularity of YouTube with more than 250 million visitors in January.

·          The Internet has become an important source of news for most Web users.  The top 10 global news brands show great diversity between country of origin, including the U.S., U.K., China and South Korea.

More: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2115