Britons baffled by new media buzzwords
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 3 October 2006 at 17:53
Tags: IPTV, Journalism, Podcasting, RSS, Wikis
Data from a new survey just released by Nielson/NetRatings suggests that most Briton’s who are online don’t know the meaning of new media jargon acronyms.
According to the Nielsen/NetRatings MegaPanel UK Digital Consumer Survey, just 42 per cent of Britons know what podcasting is. Another 35 per cent has heard of podcasting, but doesn’t know what it is — and 23 per cent have never hard of it at all.
Other new media jargon also leaves most people scratching their heads, particularly all the acronyms.
Seventy-five percent have never heard of V-O-D, an acronym for “video-on-demand”. Equally unknown are wikis (70 per cent “never heard of it”), IPTV (69 per cent), PVR (68 per cent), Web 2.0 (67 per cent), Triple-play (66 per cent) and VoIP (59 per cent)
and IM (57 per cent).
The numbers jumped significantly when the full term was used rather than the acronym. At the most extreme, there was a 350 per cent increase in recognition when PVR was explained as “personal video recorder”.
Sixty-seven per cent have still never heard of RSS, but at least 2 per cent more people know the acronym than one of the things it supposedly stands for, “Really Simple Syndication”. However, 40 per cent said they receive automatic news feeds to their browser or desktop.
Clearly, a large number of people are using technologies which they can’t name.
It’s a perfect illustration of something that the Guardian’s Ben Hammersley pointed out at the Frontline Club last week: None of this may matter in the long run. As RSS becomes embedded in the new version of Windows and various browsers, it’s a technology that will become invisible. More and more people will use it, but fewer and fewer will know what it is called.
In fact, Hammersley suggested, it’s usually a clear sign that a technology is still in its early stages of adoption when it is known to its users by its technical name rather than some simplified brand name.
Update: Dave Sifry of Technorati has made the same point in an interview with BusinessWeek, as has Simon Waldman speaking with Journalism.co.uk. I knew that sounded familiar…
Tags: IPTV, Journalism, Podcasting, RSS, Wikis
