We will return to normal transmission soon. :)

<insert sound of jaws dropping and silence here />

That number is bigger than the amount of websites that were around in 1995 when it all started to go (just a little) crazy.

So in the UK in 2004, online advertising spend was higher than radio’s and during the first half of this year more money was spent on it than on outdoor media…it now grabs around a 5.8% share of the market and the next thing its sights are set on is the directories and then direct mail, newspapers and finally TV.

Once again, eMarketer has a good wrap-up and some charts as well.

As of the 14th of October 2005, Motorola are the official site-wide sponsor of The Podcast Network.

This is an amazing deal for not only everyone involved with TPN, but also for the whole podcastng community. Motorola are one of the leading manufacturers of communications devices in the world and to have a multi-national organisation of that standing decide to get involved in podcasting can only help the community be accepted by the marketing and communications industry around the world.

You can read the official press release at the TPN Network Blog.

The main findings are:

• As at 30 June 2005 total broadband take-up was 2,183,300.
• Broadband take-up has increased by 1,135,500 or 108.3 per cent, from the
  June 2004 figure of 1,047,800.
• The take-up of ADSL services is now at 1,579,500.

All of the reports that they have done since 2001 can be found here.

A US$100 million fund focussing on RSS and syndication tells me that its being taken seriously and is no longer a geeky/nerdy thing to talk about. About time too…

The surveys respondents also showed that in the 6-8 year old age group, 40% had been online for over two years, with 79% of kids 9-17 years old having been online for two years as well.

Other interesting stats include;

As an average, kids and teens in Australia use the net for about 6.3 hours per week (up from 5.3 hours in 2003), with older teens (15-17 years old) spending 15 hours per week online.

1 in 3 kids (between the ages of 6-17) can’t live without TV, 1 in 5 can’t live without music and 1 in 6 can’t l ive without the internet

Demographic profile of RSS users in North America by Age (Forrester, 2005)

• 2% of online adults and 5% of online young-adults (12-21 years old) in North America use RSS
• 66% of adult RSS users are male along with 65% of young-adult RSS users
• Average age of adult RSS users is 38.9 vs 45 for non-RSS users
• The average time spent reading newspaper or magazines per week is lower amongst RSS users (5.3 hours vs 6.1 hours)
• An avegae of 16.5 hours per week is spent using the internet by adult RSS users vs 8.5 hours by non-RSS using adults
• 64% of RSS users have broadband vs only 44% of non-RSS users
• Usage of wireless data services is higher amongst adult RSS users (35% vs 14%) and young-adult RSS users (75% vs 59%)
• 78% of adult and 79% of young adult RSS users are “Tech Optimists” (vs 58% of adult and 68% of young adult non-RSS users)
• 27% of adut RSS users read blogs and 25% publish or maintain blogs, while 33% of young-adult RSS users publish or maintain a blog

US Blog readers who read blogs via RSS (Blogads, March 2005)

• Always - 4.4%
• Often - 7%
• Occasionally - 16.5%
• Never - 72.4 %

“There is little that gets Valley girls and boys as hot and bothered as when an Internet company gets funded by both Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. So it’s worth noting that the iconic venture shops have participated in an $8.85 million Series A round for PodShow Inc., according to a regulatory filing. For an added bonus, both John Doerr and Ray Lane have taken board seats, joining both Jerry Newman of Bear Stearns and omnipresent angel investor Ram Shriram (Google, Plaxo, Zazzle, etc.), who is representing shareholder Harris MyCFO Inc.” - Private Equity Week Wire

:)

WOW!!!

Compare the mobile phone subscribers number to the broadband subscriber number, which is “only” 31.7 million people, and you can see why the convereged mobile device is not the internet device of the future…but the internet device of today.

As the title of this blog says… “welcome to the present”.

(Courtesy of the always amazing Smart Mobs)

It essentially allows you to create “clouds of tags”, like the tags you see in Technorati and Flickr, from blogs XML feeds. It goes through blog posts and displays the most popular words and phrases…very nice.

Below you will see the “TagCloud” for this blog.

Then look no further than The Hitchhiking Blogger’s Guide To IBM Blogs.

Well worth the read.

From the site: “Listen in as veterinarians and pet lovers like you discuss topics such as animal training, pet surgery, behavioral theories and pet insurance.”

They have a heap of RSS feeds running from various sites as well. It appears that Purina have really got the idea about blogs, podcasting and RSS…a lot of sites under the Purina banner have that little orange XML button at the bottom of their web pages…nice…

Now…how would a company like Purina use RSS outside of syndicating audio and text??? Thats when its gets interesting…

According to IBM, it will be full of “useful information to keep our shareholders apprised of our business strategy”

It is important to remember that blogs and RSS (in all its forms) are an extremely important tool in the communications toolbox and are something that should just be a “part of the mix”…and not just when developing comm’s plans for the general public (customers and consumers), but also when working out how you need to talk to staff, partners, vendors, suppliers and anybody else that you need to communicate with.