Seth Godin points out something I fear we are all too eager to forget. An example:
88% of all users have never heard of RSS.
1% of internet users use Digg on an average day.
20% of the world speaks English.
This is especially relevant to all of you who are (like me) young Wellington IT professionals. We live in a very insulated environment and can sometimes forget how much of this isn’t “normal”. Let me add a few more of my own specific for Wellington:
Wellington has the highest average income of a city in New Zealand.
Wellington has the highest percentage of people with tertiary qualifications.
Wellington has the highest amount of people who walk to work and use public transport.
As Seth points out, the point of this list isn’t to persuade you to give up your new media quest and become another Auckland drone driving your oversized SUV to work. “No, all the growth and the opportunity and the fun is at the leading edge, at the place where change happens.” It’s just worth remembering where you are on the bell curve in contrast to where a lot of other people are. Keep in touch with this side, you have as much to learn from them as they do from you.
Comments
There are 3 responses to Did ya get the memo?
Thursday, 14th September 2006 12:32 pm
Excellent post John
I knew that RSS adoption was low and that’s partly why I push it so hard on my own site. Once it’s baked into everything Windows Vista + Office 2007 (because, lets face it, the vast mob are using those products and they don’t easily make RSS obvious) I think subscription levels will sky rocket.
Sites with 25,000 RSS subscribers may have 250,000+ subscribers in 5 years time.
I’ll only comment on RSS at the moment
– JD
Thursday, 14th September 2006 1:47 pm
Thanks for the comment JD, I thought the same when discovering RSS was built in the 2007 Outlook.
Thursday, 14th September 2006 4:44 pm
On the topic of baking RSS into everything… Yahoo!’s
new webmail interface has a built in RSS reader, cool!