Incentives Driving People To Social Networking As Facebook

Adam Hartley at the MSN says that having thousands of Facebook friends don’t reflect on the friendship in the traditional sense because our capacity to have friends is limited.

Mr. Hartley who calls Facebook friend acquisition as “Friend Farming” writes,

According to evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar, 150 is the largest number of people that you can share trust and obligations with, explains psychologist Dr Rebecca McGuire-Snieckus.

That magic number of 150 friends is thought to be a cognitive limit to the number of friends we can maintain, the psychologist adds. "While people can boast hundreds and thousands of friends on Facebook, Dunbar would say that it is impossible to feed and nourish all of these relationships."

So having friends in excess of the Dunbar 150 suggests that social networking has hardly been about friends but about something more.

Mr. Hartley adds, (bold highlights mine)

Recent academic research suggests there are four primary motivations for going on social networking - social (meeting friends, having an online community); information (finding jobs and useful knowledge); entertainment (FarmVille!) and self-status seeking. It is this latter urge that drives friend farming.

Well different people have different incentives to join Facebook or other social networks.

To my account, some of my non-traditional friends, who shares the same ideas, ideals, values or philosophy as I, have been a fountain of informational wealth. In short, I learn alot from them and I am very appreciative of that.

Of course shared interest also means an online community, which is what I have been saying all along as the vertical flow of communication and knowledge dispersion. People with shared interest can exchange ideas directly which results to increased knowledge. Local knowledge is now globalized through Facebook and Twitter. Our personal interests are channeled by niches or by specialization. We form tribes despite the geographical distance.

And there are others whom I also gladly got to know through online games.

And importantly, they connect me real time to my family wherever they are.

While it may true for some or for many where adding or farming friends could be a form of status signalling, I find the zeitgeist of social network sites as expanding the human experience.

And it is why social networking will change the way we live.

Maria Lourdes Aragon: Another Celebrity Sensation From Globalization?

Just like Charice Pempengco and Journey’s Arnold Pineda before her, Canadian based 10 year old Filipina Maria Lourdes Aragon looks likely the next celebrity sensation as a result of the web enhanced globalization evolution.

This from OMG.yahoo

Lady Gaga was overcome with emotion after a video of a 10-year-old fan performing a flawless rendition of "Born This Way" hit the internet and Access caught up with Maria Lourdes Aragon to bring you all the details on this budding web sensation! …

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, the Grammy Award-winning singer saw Maria's video tribute less than 24 hours after the young fan had posted it. Gaga then re-Tweeted the video to her followers early Thursday, writing, "Can't stop crying watching this. This is why I make music. She is the future."

The reason I have been pressing on this is to demonstrate how the web has virtually cut the geographical distance and directly connected people or increased social interactions without the traditional layers that would have limited discovery and access to required information.

And this isn’t just in seen in celebrities. Goods and services and most importantly ideas have likewise fluxed in such a horizontal manner where knowledge, which used to be localized, has now been globalized. In terms of knowledge, the world is now everyone’s oyster.

And this is why, in contrast to the obstinate views of top-down analysts and the ideological neo-luddites, the unprecedented spread of the People Power phenomenon in the Middle East and Africa, have caught almost everyone by surprise.

The internet, like the printing press, has and will serve as the most critical instrument for the spread of the Hayekian knowledge revolution or Alvin Toffler’s Third wave, as epitomized by the newly discovered celebrities bypassing traditional talent recruitment channels or as seen in the People Power near synchronous phenomenon in MENA.

These are structural changes occurring at the fringes which people hardly notices (yes they see the changes but they hardly understand its mechanics and implications).

Like it or not, these changes will inevitably shape our future (commerce, lifestyle, culture and politics).

Libertarianism And The Internet

The ever brilliant GMU Professor Bryan Caplan notes that the social skills of libertarian students have materially increased over the past few years due to the internet.

Professor Caplan writes,

The best explanation I've got so far: the Internet. Back in the old days, libertarian students spent a lot of time alone with their books. It was awfully hard to meet others with a shared interest in liberty. This social isolation had two effects. The first was a treatment effect: Libertarians got a lot less practice sharing their ideas in a civilized and constructive way. The second was a selection effect: Few "people people" became libertarians because it was too depressing. As the Internet - and social networking, its favorite child - blossomed over the last two decades, these effects of libertarian isolation largely faded away. Nowadays, almost no libertarian is isolated unless he wants to be. As it turns out, few do.

Aside from linking or connecting shared interests in real time and across diverse geography, the internet offers a wealth of informational exchange, at diminishing costs, from which libertarians use to solidify their convictions, grounded mostly on philosophical, political and or economic reasons.

So convictions are not only backed by what marketing guru Seth Godin would call as ‘tribes’, but also by increased knowledge that provides confidence to libertarian adherents. And this helps increase social skills and the number of enthusiasts which likewise help reduce libertarians from isolation.

Besides, in what I would call the unfolding Hayekian knowledge revolution brought about by democratization of knowledge through the internet, libertarian philosophy blends smoothly with horizontal flow of informational exchange as previously discussed here.

In other words, my bold forecast is that the philosophy of libertarianism and classical liberalism is bound to go mainstream.

The Web As Foundation To The Knowledge Revolution

``The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources—if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.”- Friedrich von Hayek

Dictators of Tunisia and Egypt have recently been toppled. Autocratic leaders of Yemen, Jordan and Algeria have likewise been under political pressure.

The web’s real time connectivity coursed through social media has allowed for a widespread diffusion of information...and knowledge. And this has lowered the cost of organization and mobilization that has apparently increased the demand for political spontaneous actions in the form of “people power” political movements.

In short, the economics of the web has been transforming the political order[1].

But when we read social media sceptics like such as Stratfor’s Marko Papic and Sean Noonan, who writes[2]... (bold highlights mine)

Social media alone, however, do not instigate revolutions. They are no more responsible for the recent unrest in Tunisia and Egypt than cassette-tape recordings of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini speeches were responsible for the 1979 revolution in Iran. Social media are tools that allow revolutionary groups to lower the costs of participation, organization, recruitment and training. But like any tool, social media have inherent weaknesses and strengths, and their effectiveness depends on how effectively leaders use them and how accessible they are to people who know how to use them...

The key for any protest movement is to inspire and motivate individuals to go from the comfort of their homes to the chaos of the streets and face off against the government. Social media allow organizers to involve like-minded people in a movement at a very low cost, but they do not necessarily make these people move.

...we understand that such objections have been founded on superficial premises-mostly from underrating the importance of knowledge and the continued the expectations that political developments flow from top-down dynamics.

Hayek’s Knowledge Revolution

Knowledge, according to the great Friedrich von Hayek[3], never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.

This simply means that everyone’s unique perspective represents as dispersed knowledge. When dispersed knowledge are combined, exchanged, mimicked and improved upon these interactions result to fresh or innovative ideas.

Prolific author and writer Matt Ridley calls such phenomenon as Ideas having Sex[4].

Professor Don Boudreaux expounds[5] on Matt Ridley’s intellectual intercourse.

The easier it is for ideas to get together, check each other out, and jump into bed with each other, the greater will be the number of newly created ideas — ideas that would not otherwise be conceived.

Copulating ideas has also another very important role: coordination of diversified information into the production of goods and services. And this has been the path to our (human) progress.

Matt Ridley, author of the very impressive book the Rational Optimist writes[6]

``the sophistication of the modern world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination. It is a collective enterprise. Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. The knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.

And that’s exactly what the web has been facilitating—an unlimited orgy of ideas—Hayek’s knowledge revolution is essentially being realized through social media.

From Vertical To Horizontal Flow

In the past the flow of information reflected on how economic production had been organized: the industrial age marked by mass production and thus a top to bottom dynamic. This holds true even with the political framework. From the top down economic structure emerged the grand experiments with centralized form of governance in the form of communism, socialism, autocracy, fascism and totalitarianism.

The traditional medium of information for the consuming public had been mostly through TV, radio and newspapers. Because of the limited networks, these institutions discriminated on the information it chose to broadcast, thus the exchange of ideas had largely been constrained.

Governments easily resorted to information control via political censorship in order to regulate “the moral and political life of the population[7]” or when political leaders felt the need to advance their interests.

Controlling the flow of information meant controlling the medium. Thus, political leaders throughout history have attempted to control the medium to preserve political power.

This time is proving to be different.

Today information flows real time and horizontally, enabled by the web.

People can simply self publish their thoughts, unedited, via the blogsphere (which incidentally accounts for an estimated 133 million[8] bloggers and growing) or through privately owned websites.

People can send messages via email or even by text messages via mobile phone.

People can also air blips of short messages or comments via the online community as Facebook and Twitter.

Or produce videos via podcasting and youtube that are being broadcasted via blip.tv or vimeo or video aggregators which has been posing a threat to TV.

And investors have been following the money trail.

As more and more people get wired or become netcitizens AD money spent on the internet has substantially been growing[9] see figure 6.

Figure 6: AD Spending Follow the Money Trail (Morgan Stanley)

Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker predicts of the explosion of mobile internet as the major source of growth for the web[10].

Even some TV programs today try to interact with the web by publishing tweets or facebook comments of audiences on air!

The democratization of information from the web or cyberspace has dramatically altered the complexion of knowledge distribution.

Gossip And The Transition To A Horizontally Based Political Order

In the hunter gatherer society, where our ancestors wandered in small tightly knit groups, gossips were used as a tool to evaluate relationships and as form of social discipline.

Aside from useful information, gossips, according to David Brooks of the Biorational[11], served to ``maintained social bonds and enforced social norms. In small groups like our ancestors' hunter-gatherer bands, in which everyone talks to everyone else regularly, liars and social cheats were found out quickly and were dealt with quickly. So lying and social cheating were relatively rare.”

The introduction of the web has basically brought back the traditional role of gossip.

For instance, Wikileaks has spilled the beans on many stealth government activities, and wikileaks has been instrumental in unleashing the popular “Jasmine” revolt in Tunisia[12].

Despite governments attempt to harass and control the founder of wikileaks, the success wikileaks has prompted for the broadening of competition.

As Professor Gary North rightly observes[13],

WikiLeaks has taken this to a new level. Now a disgruntled former WikiLeaks employee is branching out on his own. He has started a new organization, OpenLeaks. This is the kind of competition I love to see. A Reuters story describes what is about to happen. "All across Europe, from Brussels to the Balkans, a new generation of WikiLeaks-style websites is sprouting."...

As the number of these sites increases, it will become more difficult for governments to contain the leaks. The desire of leakers to become important overnight will grow.”

Of course governments can initiate countermoves such as instituting “firewalls” (as in the case of China) or kill-switch strategy[14] or the shutdown of ISP providers or disseminate counterpropaganda.

Cuba’s government for instance has designed a campaign to counter the web. Unfortunately this was again exposed, according to Wall Street Journal’s Mary O’Grady[15]

Last week a leaked video of a Cuban military seminar on how to combat technology hit the Internet. It demonstrates the dictatorship's preoccupation with the Web. The lecturer warns about the dangers of young people with an appealing discourse sharing information through technology and trying to organize.

As in the case of Egypt, the kill switch strategy has ultimately failed[16].

Circulating political propaganda or spreading disinformation can easily neutralized by “local based” knowledge or by speciality sites (e.g. snope.com).

One important development from the web is that it has altered the way governments have been behaving, as governments seemingly become more cautious and possibly less repressive in dealing with transgressors or with the political opposition, as in the case of China.

Borje Ljunggren of Yale Global notes of several incidences and sees[17] that

In case after case since 2004, the internet has dramatically changed the course of an event, forcing the party to maneuver between response and repression.

Mr. Ljunggren further notes that Chinese state control of information has also been under pressure,

He further writes, (bold emphasis mine)

Censorship is an organic part of the party-state and will no doubt remain a crucial weapon, but its usage is increasingly exposed as the Chinese internet society becomes aware of the extent to which entrenched party interests determine their access to information. As a consequence, an idea of a “right to know” is taking shape in China’s rapidly growing online civil society and this could, in Shirk’s analysis, become “the rallying cry of the next Chinese revolution.

While internet freedom clearly is not about to be declared, civil society and new technology will over time push limits beyond the axiomatic boundaries of the party-state.”

As one would notice the vertical-hierarchal structure of governments are constantly held under pressure by the democratization of knowledge.

And this should apply with political ideology too.

Political and economic ideology latched on a vertical top-bottom flow of power will be on a collision course with horizontal real time flow of democratized knowledge.

This would likely result to less applicability of ideologies based on centralization, which could substantially erode its support base and shift political capital to decentralized structure of political governance that would conform with the horizontal structure of information flows.

People will know more therefore control from the top will be less an appealing idea.

The final word from futurist Alvin Toffler[18], who predicted this Hayekian Knowledge Revolution which he molded through as his Third Wave concept.

``Computers can be expected to deepen the entire culture’s view of causality, heightening our understanding of the interrelatedness of things, and helping us to synthesize meaningful “wholes” out of the disconnected data whirling around us....The intelligent environment may eventually begin to change not merely the way we analyze problems and integrate information but even the chemistry of our brains.”

---

[1] See The Web Is Changing The Global Political Order, January 29, 2010

[2] Papic Marko and Noonan Sean Social Media as a Tool for Protest, stratfor.com February 3, 2010

[3] Hayek, Friedrich August von The Use of Knowledge In Society, Individualism and Economic Order, Mises.org, p.77

[4] See Matt Ridley: When Ideas Have Sex, August 11, 2011

[5] Boudreaux Donald J. Promiscuous, Productive Ideas, CATO Unbound, September 10, 2010

[6] Ridley Matt, Humans: Why They Triumphed, Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2010

[7] Newth, Mette Newth The long history of censorship Beacon for Freedom of Expression, 2001

[8] Bradley Phil, Great Blog statistics, Phil Bradley’s Weblog

[9] See The Deepening Of The Information Age: News Sources And Ad Spending, January 7, 2011

[10] Meeker, Mary Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research, slideshare.net 2010

[11] The Bio-Rational Institute Pleistocene brain, mobile phone, May 26, 2006

[12] International Business Times, Wikileaks helped spark Tunisia revolt : FPJ January 29, 2011

[13] North Gary When the Insiders Lose Control, February 3, 2011

[14] Cowie James, Can the Internet Tame Governments? – Part I, Yale Global, February 9, 2011

[15] O’Grady, Mary Anastacia Will Cuba Be the Next Egypt?, Wall Street Journal February 7, 2011

[16] See Egyptian Revolt: Web Censorship Fails, February 1, 2011

[17] Ljunggren Borje Can the Internet Tame Governments? – Part II, Yale Global February 11, 2011

[18] Toffler, Alvin The Third Wave p 175

The Web Is Changing The Global Political Order

Here is futurist Alvin Toffler as interviewed by the Gartner fellows in 2006: (bold emphasis mine)

I also think there's going to be a great boom when we stop thinking about companies and start thinking about restructuring governments - and completely restructuring these gigantic pyramidal bureaucracies that we rely on and that no longer function. So I think that there's going to be a huge market for software in new kinds of organizations. Now, I'm not sure whether it'll still be called software or what, but as you no doubt read in the book, I expect to see one big institution after another collapse just like the Katrina experience with FEMA and the government and so on. That our corporate structures are designed for the industrial age - and that made sense then and Max Weber wrote about it in 1910 and so forth and so on - but they're clearly inappropriate to the systems that are now growing up, economic, social, cultural and all the rest.

The web became an instrumental tool in uprooting Tunisia’s dictatorship as shown here and here.

Sensing the same fate that might befall the 30 year authoritarian regime, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak swiftly orders communications cut as riots has escalated.

From Business Insider

From the New York Times

For the first time since the 1980s, Mr. Mubarak felt compelled to call the military into the streets of the major cities to restore order and enforce a national 6 p.m. curfew. He also ordered that Egypt be essentially severed from the global Internet and telecommunications systems. Even so, videos from Cairo and other major cities showed protesters openly defying the curfew and few efforts being made to enforce it. (emphasis mine)

Old political structures designed for the Industrial era appear to be crumbling exactly as Mr. Toffler predicted. This is only part of the ongoing adjustment towards the “knowledge economy”.

Update:

I’d like to add that the transition to the knowledge economy is being fed by the forces of decentralization brought about by connectivity and information dissemination. And this is what governments are afraid of.

Of course, another major factor that contributes to this societal discontent has been inflationism- seen through rising politically sensitive commodity prices.

As we have long been saying, these are two major forces in collision.

Global Stock Market Update: Advancers Still Dominate

Here is an update of the performances of world stock markets courtesy of Bespoke Invest.

From Bespoke

Just over 30% of the countries shown are down so far this year. Bangladesh has been the worst performer in 2011 with a decline of 23.69% year to date. The country was the 2nd best performer in 2010 behind Sri Lanka with a gain of 82.79%. With its uprising this month, Tunisia is the only other country down more than 10%.

Of the G7 countries, Italy ranks first, followed by France (+6%), the US (+2.57%), Germany (+2.22%), and Japan (+1.14%). The UK ranks second to last of the G7 countries with a gain of 0.74%. Canada ranks dead last and is the only G7 country that is down year to date (-0.69%).

Looking at the BRICs, China continues to struggle with a year-to-date decline of 4% after falling 14.31% in 2010. India is also struggling with a decline of 6.62%, but unlike China, India saw nice gains last year. Russia is currently the top performing BRIC country with a year-to-date gain of 5.39%, and Brazil is just barely in the black at +0.12%.

My comments

Trading Places. Many of last year’s top performers are at the bottom and that includes the Philippines. Whereas many of last year’s laggards are on the upper echelon of the winner’s bracket (Italy, Spain, Greece).

Tailwind. Some of last year’s topnotchers continue to sizzle (Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Estonia), while some of last year’s tailenders continue to trail (Bermuda, Dubai, China).

Definitely NOT A Bear Market. With 30% of global equities down, the obverse side is that 70% of global equities are up. In short, gainers still dominate.

Developed world outpaces major Emerging Markets. It’s yet too early to say that this will be the central trend for the year. Though I wouldn’t bet on it.

Web Revolution. Bespoke links to a New York Times site which shows of the video that triggered the People’s Power revolution in Tunisia. The link here. It’s amazing to see how political events are being shaped by the web.

The Deepening Of The Information Age: News Sources And Ad Spending

If educational trends appear to be turning digital, the same dynamic seems to take hold with the way people use media.

A poll says that in the US, while news acquisition by the public has been mainly through TV, the internet, as major competitor, has rapidly been catching up.

According to Pew Research (chart also from them)

The internet is slowly closing in on television as Americans' main source of national and international news. Currently, 41% say they get most of their news about national and international news from the internet, which is little changed over the past two years but up 17 points since 2007. Television remains the most widely used source for national and international news -- 66% of Americans say it is their main source of news -- but that is down from 74% three years ago and 82% as recently as 2002.

The study further notes that the less educated has remained as the last bastion or the key consumer of TV.

In other words, the less educated will likely be the last segment to adapt to the deepening use of technology.

And such transition appears to be corroborated by corporate ad spending on a global scale, where online spending has been fast closing on the gap with TV.

According to the Economist,

GLOBAL spending on advertising will grow by 4.5% in 2011, double the rate of the previous year, according to ZenithOptimedia, an ad agency. This will be led by online advertising which will increase by 16%. Television advertising will also grow, led by emerging markets, where it is an especially dominant medium. But spending on print advertising will fall by around 1%. Extending print-media brands online offers some hope of reversing the downturn, but digital ad revenue will not replace that lost by print in the foreseeable future, according to the World Association of Newspapers.

Changes have been happening at the margin.

These suggest of the broadening use of digital web based technology for a substantial share of our social activities.

Traditional mass based lifestyle tailored to the industrial era have been paving way to the information age characterized by social connectivity predicated on competition, diffusion, diversity, and specialization; an environment which can be identified with the great Austrian economist F. A. Hayek. Even TV programming trends appear as exhibiting similar symptoms (chart above from the same Pew study).

Overall, this means that lifestyle and commerce will increasingly evolve towards niches—or based on shared interests or specific ethos, that will be marked by more competition.

The implication is that statistics based on aggregates will likely become more irrelevant. In addition, investments will likely center on these growth “niche” areas. (yes, that’s an investment tip alright)

Technology Curve: Is Mobile Commerce The Future?

Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker thinks so. She has convincing evidence to prove her case, as shown in the presentation below. (hat tip: Research Recap)

According to Cecilia Kang of the Washington Post,

``Among the factors that are driving the mobile Web, Meeker said, 3G wireless data networks rank most highly. All major carriers introduced 3G access for Android phones, the iPhone, Blackberry and Palm Pre this year, making mobile Internet use mainstream at 20 percent of all wireless users, Meeker said. There has also been an explosion of Wi-Fi connection hot spots.

``Advertising may finally be set to take off on the Internet, she said. People are spending more time on the Web – more than they do reading print publications or listening to the radio. (But not as much as TV, which still dominates.) But even as users spend 28 percent of total entertainment time on the Internet, advertisers only spend 13 percent of their budgets on the Internet. That represents a $50 billion opportunity, she said, that advertisers are starting to seize." (emphasis added)

In my view this is one of the positive forces, along with globalization, that counterbalances the risks of bubbles from government policies.

Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research

View more presentations from CM Summit: Marketing in Real Time.

Follow The Money: Web Based Ad Spending

In spite of the recent crisis, the growth of internet advertising continues to accelerate...

According to the Economist, (bold highlights mine)

``WHILE the economic downturn has hit advertising, the internet has been busy building market shares. Global ad spending is estimated to fall by over 10% this year, according to ZenithOptimedia, a media firm. The internet will account for 12.3% of all advertising spending in 2009, up from 10.1% last year, and double what it was in 2005. Online ad spending in Denmark, a country with near universal broadband penetration, overtook TV spending in 2008, and is forecast to be almost a third of the ad market by 2012. In America, television advertising still dominates, though advertisers are moving from newspapers to the internet."

This is a very significant development for it shows that the major advertising trend have simply been following where the money is.

one, it reveals of the trend towards the vastly deepening of web based connectivity worldwide.

two, web based connectivity have been founded on highly segmented or niche based-marketing or audience.

In a highly competitive free market sphere, content isn't only about "specifically tailored information" but having to tap the right "community" or "tribe".

The recent recession appears to have caused a shift in web users preference, for example, from online auctions to retail discounts.

This from 24/7,(bold highlights mine)

``Based on data from Hitwise comparing US traffic market share from January to figures from November Ebay (NASDAQ:EBAY) lost 37% of its visitors. Craigslist lost 43% of its traffic, making it the largest loser among the top 25 sites. Neither number is surprising. Ebay’s earnings have been lackluster. Classified postings for apartments and jobs at Craigslist may have been hurt by the recession.

``Other sites that had sharp drops in visits include Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO), Yahoo! search, and News Corp’s (NYSE:NWS) MySpace all of which were down more than 20% during the measurement period. The MySpace figure is not surprising. The social network has been losing members to Facebook. Among the top 25 sites, Facebook has the largest gain, up 236%. The Yahoo! figures support data from other research firms covering search traffic. Yahoo! has been losing ground to Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Bing and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG). Google was the most visited of all sites measured by Hitwise and its traffic rose 7%.

``Among the largest e-commerce sites, Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT), the 2oth most visited site among all US destinations, had a 64% increase in visits compared to Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), the No. 15 site, which had a 26% increase. Wal-Mart and Amazon are locked in struggle for holiday shoppers and both have cut prices on popular items including e-books and DVDs. Visits to Target.com (NYSE:TGT) were 69% higher. Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) visits rose 23%.

``Other notable increases among large sites were MSN, up 58% and YouTube which rose 109%, confirming the trend of improving visits to online video sites."

In short, as the global populace is being driven into the web, the prevailing economic circumstances and technological benefits appear to be driving web user's preference.

three, if Denmark is to used as prospective benchmark for ad spending then even television spending could be compromised by the web.

lastly, the internet have dramatically and immensely been changing people's lifestyles and the conduct of businesses worldwide, this implies that traditionalism or traditional metrics will fail to account for the complex and dynamic changes that drives today's information age.

This would make oversimplistic prescriptions by experts based on past paradigms filled with the risks of unintended consequences.

Moreover, the profusion and democratization of information via its accessibility would likely make markets more efficient, in spite of repeated government interventions.

Asia Leads In Web Connectivity

Asia is the largest and the fastest growing region in terms of web connectivity.

That's according to the stats from comScore as shown below

(all bold highlights mine)

``In September 2009, the Internet population in the Asia-Pacific region reached 484 million visitors age 15+ that accessed the Internet from a home or work location, an increase of 22 percent from the previous year. With nearly half a billion people online, the region now accounts for 41 percent of the total 1.2 billion person global Internet audience. China, home to the largest Internet population in the world, experienced a 31-percent increase to 220.8 million, making it the fastest-growing Internet country in the region. Japan saw its online population surge 18 percent to 68.3 million, while India climbed 17 percent to 35.8 million users. "

Here is the breakdown of the growth stats of each country...

Again from comScore,

“Asia is not only home to the largest Internet population in the world, but it is also one of the fast-growing,” said Will Hodgman, comScore executive vice president for the Asia-Pacific region. “With most markets in the region experiencing double-digit growth, marketers and advertisers have the opportunity to capitalize on the potential of the online channel to reach and engage a surging number of people engaging in a variety of consumer activities online, including reading content, watching video, playing online games, engaging with brands, conducting financial transactions and making online purchases.”

To access the comScore presentation here

Let me add that web connectivity will likely enhance productivity growth and market pricing efficiency via ease of access to information thereby reducing communication, research and transaction costs.

In addition, web connectivity is likely a source of friction or can serve as deterrent against pervasive government intervention by virtue of free or liberal access to information.

With reduced government intervention web connectivity is likely to power more trade among nations.