How do Europeans use the Internet?

I attended the rather dissapointing Brands across Borders event which was held at the rather spectacular location of Millbank Tower in Westminster. The picture on the left is the venue – I’ll let you imagine the venue from the top – it is pretty amazing let me tell you

Anyhow, back to the topic.. Europeans Internet usage online. One of the presentations that day was very interesting. It was given by Laura Chaibi of Yahoo Europe about Mediascope – a study of media consumption across Europe. It is in its 6th consecutive year and this year surveyed 9095 people across 10 European countries.

First some stats on Europe itself:

• 60% of Europeans are online
• 80% of Internet users are using broadband
• 49% (!) of Internet users are using wireless
• Online population: Germany: 43.3m France: 34.4m UK: 32.4m

I thought the types of interaction online within different countries in Europe was very interesting. In Germany, people seem to be more interested in using the Internet as a resource or shopping tool using it less to communicate and interact whereas in France, people seem to be more interesting in communicating (using email, social networking and instant messaging for example) than shopping. The UK on the other hand use the Internet for all sorts of shopping and love social networks. I’d love to get the raw data and play around more with it.

Of course, it shouldnt be forgotten that these numbers are as high level as you can get but it does provide some cultural differentiation between the various countries online or rather the majority’s priorities at least.

You can see the full presentation here.

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Obama has been talked about en masse online post his election win and I am afraid I am going to continue with another post. The level of access to his presidential campaign and the use of new internet technologies as an enabler to do this has brought a completely different aspect to the presidential race. Whilst it is obvious that all the material released was still controlled, the sheer amount of information and interaction led to a greater understanding of the campaign. There is no doubt that Obama’s internet campaign was a success and I think it will be used in marketing courses the world over for a long time. The first of which is a half day event dedicated to everything he did online coming up in London soon. Of course there is plenty on the web already!

That is all great, but will it continue? It would be interesting to see if after the election Obama could continue the “open” discussion. Change.gov looks like it is might continue post election.. we will see. In the meantime another post election release, you can now see Obama’s election night photos on Flickr.

Here are some info on Obama’s camapaign online (I’ll add to these as I find them):

• ~1800 Youtube videos with more than 18m views (see channel here )
• The Obama-Biden Facebook page has over 2m supporters (here)
• ~53,000 photos on Flickr (here)
• Great article on Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook who worked on the new media campaign (here)

On an aside, Yahoo did pretty well during the elections. Obama used Flickr and Yahoo News was the most popular site on election day. I was using their election dashboard both on the day and in the run up. It was nicely done.

I wrote over on afullerview the other day about how, a year ago, it was still much easier to just pick up the Yellow Pages and find local services.. despite the feeling that the paper version was very much an out of date medium.

Today I am in need of someone local to figure out what is wrong with my dishwasher.

Here are some real world results (searching for dishwasher repair london or if possible dishwasher repair my postcode. Lets take a look at how it went and see whether it was any better than last year.

Google:

• For the London search, it did a pretty good job – displayed a separate box of local results as well as some London-wide companies.
• For the postcode search, weirdly it displayed furniture shops first but lower down it listed a bunch of possible repair businesses nearby – but mostly for boilers.. changing the search slightly (“dishwasher repairs placed in speech marks”) restricted the results to 2 but nothing nearby.
• Using Google Maps provided the same localised results from the post code search.

Yahoo:

• For the London search, Yahoo also did a pretty good job – some possibilities though not a local enough search to provide anything nearby
• For the post code search – nothing
• Yahoo Maps – I could not get it to find anything.

Live.com:

• For the London search, it found some London/nationwide companies but nothing truly local, and not as relevant as Google’s or Yahoo’s.
• For the postcode seach it found nothing.
• Using Live Maps, with the postcode it found one possibility the other side of Essex (that’s quite far outside London!)

Yell.com

• Looks like a quick win. It found a whole bunch of suppliers. On closer look though, they are all the same company (they all link to the same website!). What happened to all the suppliers that are listed in the Yellow Pages (paper version)?

Conclusion
Well the major search engines are starting to catch up with the dedicated local search engines. Yell.com is theoretically still one of the best places to start but it failed miserably here. I expected Google to do better, but with most of the info entered into its local search results being a manual process done by the businesses themselves we are really waiting for the local businesses to catchup. Yahoo and Live was a complete waste of time.

Yell has the advantage of its age old paper version which contains a huge number of businesses but it really doesnt feel like they are taking advantage of it online.

In the long term though, Google was able to recognise that the search results I required needed local businesses in the results and not just companies with websites. Once they get more information about these businesses into their servers, more and more people will surely just search from Google?

With the addition of mobile search, location is also going to become an important factor. Guess who is the default provider on my iPhone.. yup Google. I did a quick search and unsurprisingly it gave me the same results as the desktop version. It is not perfect by any means though.

There is still a long way to go to get local search right.

By the way, I eventually found someone using Google website search, as I cannot find my copy of Yellow Pages – I think I recycled it .

Thinking about the internet and its makeup. Today, when you connect to the internet, whether it is from your phone or from your computer, it is given an IP address from whatever ISP you are connected to. If you travel somewhere and connect to the internet somewhere else using the exact same device it is given an entirely different IP address.

But what if it wasn’t? What if it was your own permanent address? Just like the address you live at, or your phone number. Suddenly whereever you are you could be reached over the global Internet.

I want to give this some more thought, but I started down this path due to the impending popularisation of IPv6 which will allow for further IP addresses (given to unique devices that connect to the Internet) to become available (compared to IPv4 which we use today).

Of course the Internet is not built this way – you can’t take IP addresses with you wherever you go – so the structure of the entire Internet would probably need to be altered to achieve this; I guess this makes it completely non feasible. But there is another way to get this same functionality without a fundamental change to the internet. Dynamic DNS – it has been around for ages, and used by geeks worldwide to alow their home Internet connections to act as Internet servers. The basic principle is that when a device connects to the internet, it connects to a known location online and identifies itself, effectively acting as a phone book. Using this system you, in effect, have a portable Internet connected identity similar to a portable IP address.

Why is this useful? Do we need every device to act as a server or be reachable? One possibility is that it could work as a form of authorisation or authentication tool – identifying centrally what 3rd party systems are allowed to know about an individual. Another obvious one is as a form of standardised Internet enabled communication device.

There must be more..