No, this isn’t one more European’s rant against our transatlantic sister. It actually concerns something entirely different: viral marketing, the unruly cousin of any “proper” communication strategy that seems to have followed the same path with astonishing speed.

I don’t remember exactly when or what my first exposure to viral marketing was, but I’m pretty sure it was some YouTube video a few years ago. I am also almost certain it concerned a car but that’s all I can say. It was however a revelation. It was clever, funny and just a little dangerous. It wouldn’t bring the froth to the mouth of any of the usual defenders of our “public morality”, but you knew that this little clip could never
find a slot on any TV channel on earth. Yet within weeks, days maybe, thousands upon thousands had seen it. More importantly perhaps they had chosen to watch it, rather than have it blasted at them across the living room during the semi-conscious twilight of the ad break.

We saw it all, from the unruly children advertising contraception, to the superhero grannies advertising cars that are hard to steal, to remember just a couple. And I am speaking of viral ads here, not viral videos in general which are quite different: they don’t “sell” anything and in that sense fall outside the scope of this post.

The original viral ad, whichever that was, and the clips that followed by the hundreds, were almost uniformly brilliant. Something you could and would discuss with your friends and colleagues. What was most important however, from a marketing point of view, wasn’t so much the naughtiness, as the nagging sense of disbelief. Is this a “real ad”? Is it the work of some unknown YouTube Kurosawa, toiling away in the family loft when he ought to have a proper job, a family and a… real car? Who knew?

Somehow, at the back of everyone’s conscience it was pretty clear that the “viral”, being as slick as it was, could only be the work of pros and so another theory quickly emerged: that they were produced by advertising companies and then dumped by the customer for being too racy, only to find their way onto the web.

I remember that close to 90% of the discussion wasn’t on the clip itself, brilliant though it was but on whether it was a mistake, a trick, a real ad that had made it to YouTube, whether the company advertised was behind it or not. Yet even that was more suspension of disbelief than outright credulousness. It did get the discussion going though and that was the point.

It was, in short, revolutionary. It probably cost as much as a proper ad to create and then essentially nothing to disseminate. And it was cool in the way Captain Jack Sparrow will always, by definition, be cooler than his redcoat nemesis.

And then within a very, very few years, months maybe, captain Sparrow pulled up a leprous coat-sleeve to reveal the red underneath. No one can have any illusions any more and to crown it all, there are now even “official” virals, with a very basic Google search turning up hundreds of examples.

Let me be clear on one thing. It is neither naughty nor illegitimate. In fact its far more legitimate than a “true” viral in the sense that those putting out “official” virals own up to them from the start, even presenting them in… official press events. In reality, their “viral” aspect is making them available on the web and hoping they are good enough to be spread by people. Maybe that is what viral is all about: encouraging people to spread your message for you because said message is good enough (read funny enough) to merit spreading.

In fact it’s pretty brilliant. If I see something truly good on the web, I will send the link out to my friends. But, come to think of it, I will rarely send it out to everyone I know,  only those I know will appreciate it: I will in a sense do the audience-targeting myself because I know that if I send it to someone who won’t, or can’t, get it, I will end up with an egg on my face.

I did it back when we thought the virals were pirate stuff and I do it now that we know they aren’t exactly that and the rate at which I, in turn, receive viral ads from my friends hasn’t exactly diminished. If anything it has grown proving the value of the medium.

Yet there is something missing. Maybe it’s the titillation of not really knowing if it is real marketing or not that does it. Or maybe the fact that an official viral has to maintain all or most of the decorum expected of a proper ad. The new virals may be good, even very good, but the smoke-and-mirrors magic show has left the scene, the giggly mystery of the country fair magician is lost.

It is like discovering that Sparrow isn’t Teach but Drake, not a really a pirate but a privateer, doing his stuff on a “letter of marque” issued by the throne. Drake was more effective and historically important than the Blackbeard. But whom of the two does every schoolchild know?

An official viral can still be funny and effective as a marketing tool, but it is also like discovering that it’s FIFA employees who blow the vuvuzelas. It somehow takes all the fun out of it and along with the fun maybe, just maybe, it takes away some of the marketing effect. Or does it?

It is therefore telling of the state of the world, that it barely made it to the front page of some media for essentially a single day, before being relegated to more specialised sections, or worse…

Its not that Venter didn’t get his day on the front page. He got it. But that, more or less, was that. Even on the net, a medium supposedly more attuned to the World of Tomorrow,  coverage hasn’t come close to, say, that reserved for the iPad… Was creating life nothing more than an interesting aside? A fait divers that only tickled the odd molecular biology geek?

Strangely enough, the legions of moralising technophobes that usually accompany such scientific leaps with their doom-mongering, so far seem to be silent. People have been going on for a long time about how in this age of instant communications and truly mass media on every conceivable subject and platform our attention span has regressed to preteen levels. Or is there something else at play here?

Strangely enough, the legions of moralising technophobes that usually accompany such scientific leaps with their doom-mongering, so far seem to be silent. People have been going on for a long time about how in this age of instant communications and truly mass media on every conceivable subject and platform our attention span has regressed to preteen levels. Or is there something else at play here?

Maybe, just maybe, it is because, in fact, this goes way beyond “such scientific leaps”. In fact there has probably never been a scientific leap of this magnitude.

Fire? Pah, its everywhere… Sooner or later someone would have figured it out. The wheel? Well, deciding that something roundish could help with the everyday drudgery of hauling your fillet-mignon de Mammouth to the cave can’t have been that hard. Computers? 3D TV? The iPad? 22 language simultaneous translation? Not bad, but…

But life? Life?? This is something that not even those great techno – oracles of the past couple of centuries, Jules Verne in the 19th and Star Trek in the 20th, had predicted. Star-Trek, which is really what we should all aspire to has its share of artificial life forms, often entirely indistinguishable from the real kind, but they are mechanical, souped-up robots or holograms, not “life” in the biological sense of the word.

Venter et al created something entirely different. Sure, some will point out that they injected synthetic DNA into an existing, natural, cell. But what is a cell without its DNA… More or less nothing: it’s the DNA that does it and as Venter himself put it, with that strange little smile of his, this is the first organism whose parent is a computer. A computer, it has to be said, that is owned by none other than Craig Venter himself who is also said to be filing patent after patent, in order to ensure the commercial viability of the whole enterprise.

After all the puny bacterium is, indeed, just that: puny. It also seems to have no useful application. Others will, must, surely follow and the quicker they do the better. Oh of course people will say that care is needed and some safeguards are necessary. We don’t want some grey goo overtaking the planet (at least not before space colonisation begins) or who knows what other horror. Horrors will certainly be cooked-up by those who specialise in such things, but let’s be optimistic. As for those who will say that man was not meant to create life… well, sorry folks.

The real question then, is what we do with this. Like a small child given one of those fantastic but outrageously complicated 16+ Lego sets, mankind has to think hard. But not too long please. Pondering the philosophical aspects is essential, but it will only take us so far. Venter himself has spoken of creating a bacterium that will suck in pollution and spew fuel at the other end, which is a perfectly good idea. It also serves to illustrate how much damage humanity has been doing to the planet that its first use of its newfound powers should have to be something like this. We have to hope that things even more amazing will follow.

But then if one thing is already clear, it has to be that many wonderful things will indeed come of it but we don’t yet know what. Who would have told Alan Turing or the builders of the Colossus that a few decades later we would be speaking of the iPad? Who would have told Mendel, for that matter, where his tinkering with peas would lead humanity a couple of centuries later (and yes, Venter was the first to get there too).

This post was initially going to be about how technology seems stuck in a rut. About a certain anger at how the return of 3D film-making was trumpeted as the greatest technological marvel of the past decade, when the minds that created it might have been better employed elsewhere to the greater benefit of society. Then Venter spoke.

Up to now, there was only one Creation. From now on there are two.

It is therefore reasonable that it should have its own measuring instrument, to measure the response of public opinion to the measures it proposes (or has already taken). That instrument is the Eurobarometer, not just an instrument but a true institution of, well, institutional Europe.

Almost every other day a new Eurobarometer survey will appear informing us about what the citizenry in the EU and the candidate countries believes on this or that issue.

“Since 1973, the European Commission has been monitoring the evolution of public opinion in the Member States, thus helping the preparation of texts, decision-making and the evaluation of its work”, our confreres over at the Commission’ Communication Directorate General, proudly announce on the Eurobarometer homepage and in many ways it is more or less that. Indeed, the astute follower of EU matters cannot help but be impressed by how close policy seems to reflect the opinions of those surveyed by the Eurobarometer – and vice versa.

Worthy as it is though, Eurobarometer rarely touches upon the truly interesting questions. Well, the questions that interest me, those that usually the Press relegates to the newspapers’ “odd news” section

Admittedly, sometimes it does manage to intrigue, even titillate me in the all the right ways. To take just the most recent crop of surveys, Eurobarometer informed us that, for example, “53% of Europeans surveyed still believe that antibiotics are effective against viruses” (“still”…?) or that one in four Europeans are, physically “almost completely inactive” (I am not one of them, I blink every now and then)

Even better, it has found that almost two thirds of all Europeans no longer have all of their teeth and fully 15% have “experienced difficulties, over the last twelve months, in chewing, biting or eating food”…

Yet something is still lacking, that scintilla of pure genius still eludes the Eurobarometer. For example, they never asked the One question Ipsos, a professional polling outfit, did ask, “Have aliens already arrived?”

Many will rush to exclaim “but of course” and think of more than one celebrity (or pet) that cannot possibly have entirely terran DNA, while others will, sadly, smirk.

But back to the poll. On the whole, one participant (you will notice I was careful to avoid using the word human) in five stated that aliens do indeed live among us. The list is headed by the Indians, almost evenly balanced between believers and non-believers at 45% Vs 55%. The Chinese follow with 42% and then the Japanese and the Koreans. The first Europeans to figure on the list are the Italians, right after the Koreans with 25% and, at this point it is useful to point out that it is some of the world’s most ancient civilisations that seem to know… (not to mention John Carpenter).

Elsewhere in Europe, only 8% of the Dutch and Belgians and 9% of the French seem to have somehow stumbled upon the truth while a rather extraordinary 84% in the UK answered that aliens do not inhabit the earth.

Ipsos points out that “Those who believe that “alien beings have come to earth and walk amongst us in our communities disguised as us” (20%) are more likely to be men (22%) compared to women (17%), under the age of 35 (25%) compared to those aged 35-54 (16%) and those over the age of 55 (11%) and those more likely to be higher educated (22%) compared to those who are lower or middle educated (19%). There is virtually no difference in terms of income level (lower 22%, higher 20% or middle 19%) and marital status (married 19% versus other 21%).”

The poll, Ipsos points out, is based on “an international sample of 24,077 adults aged 18-64″ “interviewed in a total of 22 countries representing 75% of the world’s GDP”…

Eurobarometer…. eat your heart out

It is actually true – to a certain extent, although of course we all know that we aren’t talking of a particularly large extent, probably not half as large as we sometimes believe it to be. And it isn’t just because of the Big Brother state and its continuing tendency to become ever more big brotherly.

What I’m talking about here is a little different. The question isn’t how limited the true extent of our freedom really is, but how limited our actual inbred, genetically encoded need for that “freedom” sometimes proves to be.

Up there...

In quantitative terms, it is exactly… 7%. That, it seems, is the percentage of our daily life that a third party, an outside observer, Big Brother, might describe as “unpredictable”.

At least that is what a survey published in Science and reported by arstechnica would seem to suggest. In concrete terms researchers dug up customer location data held by cell-phone service providers and effectively tracked, retroactively, the movements of their customers. What they found is simple: 93% of said movements were, well, predictable. People, it seems tend to stay within a well-defined, relatively small area almost all the time.

As arstechnica puts it, “All users were roughly equally predictable, regardless of the size of their typical travelled region. Everyone seemed to have a set area that they rarely left, and that area was always travelled in a very regular way—even the jet-setters appear to rarely deviate from their travel patterns”, thus, “Regardless of how widely they travelled, the researchers could adequately predict their locations, 93 percent of the time”.

... or down here?

Thus, the article concludes, “this research has a variety of practical implications”. I’m sure it does but, to be honest, I don’t want to know. Some “implications” might indeed be practical, like the better town planning suggested by the article. Some others might also be practical but to be honest I shudder to think to whom they might be “practical”…

Actually though, this brings to mind an observation by Gerald Durrell, one of the great ambassadors of the animal kingdom to humanity. Contrary to popular belief, he had noticed that most animals, even birds, don’t really roam the wild all that much and certainly not by choice. If they can get what they need, essentially food and a mate, within a fairly limited area, they are happy to stick to that area for the rest of their lives.

Which brings to mind… myself. I don’t consider myself all that predictable and, despite everything my phone might think, my life is actually quite adventurous.

For example, it would be tempting to assume that I always have my lunch at the EP’s ground floor canteen at 12:45 day in, day out, come what may. Well no, it isn’t true at all. I am after all a real individual, a free person so I occasionally surprise my cell-phone and go to the 12th floor canteen.

Call it my 7% moment.

And yet… and yet research by at least one organisation, Pingdom, seems to show that the truth is a little different. For most social networking sites, the average user age turns out to be closer to 40 than to 20. In their own words “social media isn’t dominated by the youngest, often most tech-savvy generations, but rather by what has to be referred to as middle-aged people (although at the younger end of that spectrum)” or, to be exact, exactly 37 years old.

Looking at the results of the Pingdom survey in greater detail, four websites, classmates.com, LinkedIn.com, Delicious.com and Slashdot.org have average users older than 40. The, relatively speaking, geriatric ward, is “classmates” which, of course, seeks to reunite long lost former classmates and has an average user age of almost 45.

Speaking of Slashdot.com, “news for nerds”… Its nerd/geek credentials truly are beyond reproach, as witnessed by the recent message: “Magicjack lost a lawsuit against Boing Boing when the judge declared the legal action a SLAPP”.

At the other end, Bebo has the lowest average age of users, just 28 years and the highest number of female users, nearly 70% followed by myspace and classmates.com.

Closer to home for us here at webcom, Facebook users are a respectable 38, while Twitter‘s an even more respectable 39 (on an aside, the site processed more than a billion tweets for the first time in December). On the whole, Pingdom found that most social networkers are 35 to 44 years old and, by a modest margin mostly women. Indeed, over the 19 sites used in Pingdom’s research women represent 53% of users and men 47%.

Indeed, the over 35 age group represents about 57% of all social media users, while the under 25s just 24%, most of them in the under 18 age range. With only 9% doing the social media thing, the 18 to 24s, the age band most people probably refer to as the “young” when it comes to treating them as a target group for activities like voting or even shopping, are one of the two most under represented groups in social media. They only beat the over 65s who log in last at 3%.

Obviously, what is missing from this is depth of time: what would returning to the survey in say 5 or ten years show? Will it be greater penetration of the truly young or a continuously ageing customer base for a media that is habitually described as crucial for reaching out to the… young?

So the question is there. Despite everything people tend to believe, are the “social media” a middle age affair?

Discuss…

PS. In case you are still wondering, SLAPP means Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. What that means is not for me to answer…

Looks impressive... In many ways it is impressive too

So this is what it’s like? After more than a decade and a half as a journalist, I am now a source… Not a real source, you understand, I will gladly leave that to those thus inclined or employed, but one of the many invisible hands behind the EP’s web page. One of the… yes, one of the “faceless bureaucrats”. What the true “sources”, the MEPs, say and do, we publish.

Wait. Isn’t that journalism? No it isn’t, for the simple reason that we are actually employed by our “source”, but it’s certainly as close as it gets. What we publish, citizens read, either directly on the site or because journalists use it as a source for what they publish or broadcast.

And as the absolute newbie of the team (well, Marko our Slovenian editor with whom I share my office is technically even newer, but only by a fortnight, so it doesn’t really count) I can vouch for one thing: everything here is as conscientiously and objectively researched before it gets published as anything you will read in your newspaper. We don’t express our own opinion through what we write, but then journalists really shouldn’t either, should they? After all that’s why all newspapers have a dedicated “opinion” column and dedicated “columnists”.

A few people did actually ask after my first few days with the unit, not what I thought about the job (everyone asked that) but if something surprised me. Well, if I had to point out just one thing, it would be how similar it is to my former job, from the actual reporting to the very warm welcome by everyone when I first arrived…

Ok, its is my first jab at this and it isn’t supposed to be profound, - I formally dislike expressing profound thoughts unless they are really, truly profound- But it certainly is de profundis…

So, want to know exactly what happened in the EP today, yesterday or last week? It’s here. Want to know what is coming up? It’s here as well. Want to know both sides of an argument in the hemicycle? Yes, we usually offer that too and if we didn’t write about it ourselves, check our links, we have you all set up and ready for the jump.

Anyway… hello everyone, good morning and good luck.