19% of Internet Users are Microblogging with Twitter or other Platforms

A new survey from Pew Internet & American Life Project states:

Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.

Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users – those under age 44.

As bite-sized real-time media continues to grow, it’s going to become an increasingly important source of information. This is punctuated by the launch this week of a new social search by both Bing and Google. Read on.

Introducing Google Social Search

Yesterday Google announced the addition of Social Search to Google Labs.

With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading “Results from people in your social circle for New York.”

Here’s a demo from Google of the new search tool.

BlogWord Expo

Come learn and network with new media movers and shakers. I’ll be speaking on Friday and having a breakfast meetup on Saturday morning. Get the details here.

Bit.ly URL Shortening and Click Tracking

When sharing links on Twitter, it’s nice to use a URL shortener to save characters. In addition, I track the number of clicks on any link that I post so I can gauge the interest in various topics. My preferred service is Bit.ly.

Twitter Trendsmap

This site gives you a view of local Twitter trends on a map overlay. See what your town is buzzin’ about with Trendsmap.

I’m trying out a new system for posting the best of these resources shared here on my blog as well with a short clip of commentary. We’ll see how it goes. I’m calling these New Media Quick Clicks. They’re items that I think you’ll find useful and interesting.

Here’s a batch for you now.

Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think

If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest. This short video (4m23s) shows some fascinating statistics about the growth of social media.

Report: Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter

This report contains nine solid tips for increasing the chances that your tweets get retweeted. The more retweets you get , the more viral your content is and the more news followers you attract. The coolest part about the report is that it’s based on first-hand research.

Showdown: iPod Nano vs. Flip SD

With the arrival of the iPod Nano with video, some have speculated that the Flip could have a run for its money. Go ahead and see for yourself. Which video recorder won in this side-by-side comparison? You’ll see the difference in less than five seconds.

Coming Soon: A Free Open Source Social Network with the Power and Flexibility of WordPress

I’ve been watching with much anticipation the whisperings about a project called BuddyPress that “will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform.” This would be extremely cool. Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, has now taken BuddyPress into their fold to see its development through. I can’t wait to see this thing release.

This would allow you to create your own branded social network with the flexibility of WordPress. In addition, it would be compatible with thousands of free plugins that are sure to pop up–very cool indeed.

Free Video Quickly Shows Your Audience What a Podcast Is and How to Subscribe

Apple has produced a short video that explains what a podcast is and how to subscribe (in iTunes of course). They invite you to link to it from your web site as a resource. It would be much cooler if I could post it to my own site, but of course they want the inbound links. I wouldn’t mind something like this from the Zune team as well ;).

WordPress.com Becomes a Viable Free Starter Podcasting Solution

It’s no secret that I’m a huge WordPress fan. While I’m a proponent of installing it on your own web site, WordPress.com (their free hosted service) has now become an excellent choice for a hobbyist or “dabbler” to have a blog, feed and now at least modest media hosting.

They’ve upgraded their free service to provide 3 GB of storage. Files are hosted on Amazon S3 and bandwidth is not metered meaning you won’t be penalized for the amount of traffic you get. I’ll be revamping my podcast tutorial to use WordPress.com as a free starter solution.

Libsyn Updating Stats for More Accuracy and Better Interface

Libsyn recently announced that they have revamped the user interface for their podcast statistics. They are also going back through and reprocessing the old logs to improve accuracy. As soon as reprocessing is done, the new stats and interface will be released.

A New Essential Video Podcasting Guide Coming to Bookstores Near You

Rich Harrington, who I have the pleasure of presenting with at various events, is the co-author of a new book

Get a wealth of information from some of the brightest minds in new media. You’ll easily find numerous ideas to take your new media goals to the next level.

Facebook Has a License to Use or Sell Any Content You Post to Your Profile

Facebook’s ambiguous terms of use appear to give them more rights than you may like.

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant. . .to the Company [worldwide license]. . .to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site. . .

This blog post dissects the terms for you in plain English.

How to Promote Your Show Outside the Usual “Echo Chamber”

Podcasting has hit a bit of a plateau. In order for your audience (and podcasting in general) to grow, we need to break out of the usual “echo chamber” and promote through new channels and use better language (e.g. “It

I’m constantly monitoring a number of blogs, news feeds and other internet chatter to keep up on our lightning fast industry. Many times a week I find myself thinking, “I should blog about that.” The problem is that I don’t have time to write a complete post about every little thing I discover nor do you have time to read all those posts. I could just do one of the del.icio.us bookmark auto-posts, but that doesn’t tell you why I thought it was important or why I wanted to share it with you.

The goals of this blog is to help you stay up on the news that matters most and affects you as a social and new media publisher and marketer. The New Media Digests posts will help fulfill my desire to share these small discoveries and your need to stay up to date on a potentially overwhelming amount of information.

Each New Media Digest post will:

1. Deliver the latest and most important news and resources related to new and social media publishing, monetization and marketing
2. Allow you to consume the info in a matter of a few minutes
3. Tell you briefly why it is important and suggest what you should do about it
4. Give you a link where you can find out more if you’d like

The format may change, but for now each post will consist of up to about five entries that look something like this.

The First Line Will Be a Headline that Summarizes the Story (this will also be a link to the resource or story)
Then there will be one or two sentences that tell you: 1) why it’s important and 2) what you should do about it.

The first New Media Digest will follow this introductory post. I’ve created a category for these posts for easy access.

How can I make these digest posts useful for you to help you reach more people, make more money and market more effectively?