I was at another one of those dinner parties last night where the other people were frankly bothered and bewildered by the fact that I blog and use RSS to track hundreds of different information sources. "How do you find the time?" was the cry, and I didn't have an answer. I don't know where I find the time. Maybe I watch less television.

But it did make me think - again - that people in Britain over the age of, say, 35, are in the main not using this stuff. And then I found this on my RSS reader this morning: MetzMash: 89% of Your Customers Don't Blog:

So, based on the aggregation of the Forrester studies from 2007, based on the United States, here are the key take-aways that I have, about our social media use, on average:

75% of your customers don't read blogs
89% of your customers don't write a blog, either
71% of your customers don't watch user-generated content
75% of your customers don't visit social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook)
82% of your customers don't participate in discussion forums
75% of your customers don't read online ratings or reviews
89% of your customers don't post online ratings or reviews
92% of your customers don't use RSS

And this is in America. In Britain, I reckon those numbers are even bigger, and for the over-35s, even bigger again. Worth thinking about.

Fascinating article in the NY Times today about the way younger people are swapping news among themselves:

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

This trend away from gatekeepers and towards social networks is not a new idea, of course, but the importance of the Times piece is perhaps the extent to which it has already happened - and the extent to which it is driving engagement. The piece makes the point that the Democrat nomination race has attracted a lot of attention among young people, and it is perhaps dangerous to see the present, unique, political moment as the start of a long-term shift. But it's also true that in Britain the reemergence of the right wing has seen the start of a similar movement, albeit on a smaller scale, led by successful right-wing bloggers. And for news organisations, here's the money quote:

Ms. Buckingham recalled conducting a focus group where one of her subjects, a college student, said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

Thanks to Hilary for the link to a brilliant post by Kyle MacRae, Unedited. Unfiltered. Untrue, which brilliantly skewers CNN's new iReport site. If you haven't seen iReport yet, here's what CNN had to say about it:

Welcome to a brand new beta site for uncensored, user-powered news. CNN built the tools, you take it from there. All the stories here are user-generated and instant: CNN does not vet or verify their authenticity or accuracy before they post. The ones with the "On CNN" stamp have been vetted and used in CNN news coverage.

Anyone who knows anything about online communities and their intersection with online media should have all their lights flashing now, and Kyle obviously did. He uploaded a spurious picture, claimed it represented a fire in Scotland, and then sat back. He even managed to get the post on the front page of iReport by opening multiple tabs in Firefox and getting them to autorefresh. A citjournalism site that allows stuff like that is like a newspaper site that allows anyone on its editorial team to edit the front page. Stupid stupid stupid.

Read the whole post, and then wonder on the thing that got to me about it: the pompous prognostications of Mashable, who declared:

Ultimately, I’d say that CNN “gets it” with the iReport site. In addition to clearly understanding how to organize user-generated content, they are taking a fairly hands-off approach by not screening or censoring content, and not requiring registration to navigate around the site. Plus, with the bonus of being so closely tied to CNN, it should serve as a “minor leagues” of sorts for those that aspire to work in broadcast journalism, since citizen reporters will have an opportunity to become “stars” on the site and have their work aired on the cable network.

This points to a whole category problem with online journalism: people with no understanding of it, and with no understanding of how useable media comes about and comes to be trusted, can airily and condescendingly claim a company "gets it" just because they've put some UGC tools together, refused to moderate and generally just been super-cool and laid-back about the whole thing. Media cannot and will never be created on that basis. You need an editor. Otherwise it's just a message board with pretty pictures and a cool toolbar.