A study conducted by Google and KellerFay Group to understand the impact internet has on the word of mouth effect. Top finding: Google is the #1 spark of word of mouth conversations and directly informs 146 million brand conversations a day.

Download the study as PDF.

Not only has Justin Bieber passed 300 million views, the video has only been on YouTube for 6 months compared to 9 months for Gaga. Just amazing.

Here’s the complete top 10 live.

Unbelievable, wouldn’t you say? Kudos to Gary.

• Over 1,000,000 books are published each year. A Google book search scanner can digitize 1,000 pages every hour
• There are 240,000,000 TVs in the U.S., 2,000,000 are in bathrooms (?!)
• More video was uploaded to YouTube in the last 2 months than if ABC/NBC/HBO had been airing new content 24/7/365 since 1948
• 95% of all songs downloaded last year weren’t paid for
• Wikipedia launched in 2001. It now feature over 13 million articles in 200 languages
• The average American teen send 2,272 text messages … each month
• 90% of the 200 billion emails sent every day is spam
• The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper, and a thousand times more powerful, and about a hundred thousand times smaller than the one computer in MIT 45 years ago

Mashable and Silicon Valley Insider on the same topic.

Personal top 10 stats from the video (all statistics and sources found at the official site):

• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers… 96% of them have joined a social network.
• Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web.
• Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years). Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months… iPhone applications hit 1 billion downloads in 9 months.
• If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia.
• % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees… 80%.
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama.
• There are over 200,000,000 Blogs. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily.
• 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook… daily.

Via Beta Alfa and Mashable. Full statistics from the video available over at Socialnomics.net.

I just watched the beautiful “HOME” documentary by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. It has +1M views on YouTube after about a month. I’d warmly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. A bit “propagandic” in an Inconvenient Truth way, but hey – it’s only the truth this time around too. Some key takeaways:

• 20% of the world’s population consumes 80% of its resources
• The world spends 12 times more on military expenditures than on aid to developing countries
• 5,000 people a day die because of dirty drinking water. 1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water
• Nearly 1 billion people are going hungry
• Over 50% of grain traded around the world is used for animal feed or biofuels
• 40% of arable land has suffered long-term damage
• Every year, 13 millions hectares of forest disappear
• One mammal in 4, one bird in 8, one amphibian in 3 are threatened with extinction. Species are dying at a rhythm 1,000 times faster than the natural rate
• Three quarters of fishing grounds are exhausted, depleted or in dangerous decline
• The average temperature of the last 15 years have been the highest ever recorded
• The ice cap is 40% thinner than 40 years ago
• There may be at least 200 million climate refugees by 2050

Scary.

Some of you might have remember that I mentioned the footytube 2.0 beta a while back. Yesterday I got a very nice email from Lee over at footytube, inviting me to take the new version for a test run:

Heya,

A little while ago you signed up to the footytube 2.0 Private Beta.

We are delighted to announce that the beta is now ready, and we would be chuffed to bits if you wanted to come in and be amongst the first people to give it a spin.

I think footytube 2.0 was originally set to launch in November if I remember correctly, the message about the new platform has certainly been up there for a while now. Hopefully it means that they’ve not experienced serious complications, but that they’ve considered and tweaked forth and back for the best possible result.

I’ll have to say that I’m really impressed with the new platform and design at first glance. I haven’t had much time to try out the arsenal of functionality, but it looks beautiful! The first you’re met with is a video grid or ‘Zeitgeist’ which shows what footytube users fancy today. It seems that most functionality is driven by Ajax, something that makes the site clean, fast and easy to navigate. Footytube also seem to have glanced one or two times at YouTube (surprise surprise), ‘borrowing’ not only fractions of the name but also certain functionality. The mandatory widget with related, channels and popular videos are all there, what’s more surprising is perhaps the new added features (very cool!) such as the ‘community opinion on team performance’ and ‘nominate a goal for goal of the week’.

Focused on user interaction, easy navigation, and speed – I’ve no doubt that the new footytube will be a big success. A much cleaner layout and design will definitely help. All the best!

There are numerous “download streaming videos” resources online, most of them are aimed at downloading YouTube videos where perhaps KeepVid is the most famous one. In the case of YouTube, KeepVid simply lets you input a URL of a video and then kickbacks two download links, one for normal quality and one for high quality. Easy enough and serves the purpose. Users have also written Firefox add-ons for this, such as Magic’s Video Downloader and Fast Video Download.

However, the other day I had a different agenda, I found a song on YouTube, a live performance of a song that I only wanted the sound from to be able to use it on my iPod. What then? There are of course sources for this as well, where ListenToYouTube is probably the best and most user-friendly. It works the same way as KeepVid, letting you input a URL to a YouTube video, and then extracts the sound; leaving behind only a download link for the sound in MP3 format.

The reason this is okayish and not great is that the MP3 it creates is in poor quality compared to what you’d be used to. The audio bitrate is 64 kbps whereas most MP3 song you would be used to listening to are in either 128 or 160 kbps. It’s a great service, but for me – it’s not good enough for my iPod.

The solution to this is downloading AoA Audio Extractor, we’ll then use a combination of the KeepVid solution to grab the video, and use AoA Audio Extractor to extract the sound from it. This way, we’ll be able to choose the audio bitrate, sample rate, as well as output type (MP3, WAV, AC3).

Save it where you like, and import it to your iPod – voila!

I digged into the Analytics data today for the first time in months. The past couple of weeks, traffic to Oscar and Friends has skyrocketed and convenient enough – I got the answer to why really easy. It seems as if my post on Avril Lavigne passing 100 millions views on YouTube, and more precisely the picture in it, has caught the attention of Google Image Search. There are now people from all over the world watching the picture, Googling pictures of Avril in every possible combination; avril lavigne, avril, girlfriend avril lavigne, girlfriend, avril lavinge, avril lavigne girlfriend, avril lavgine, avril lavigne girl friend, and so on.

Funnily enough, more than 200 visitors found the post (or the picture) by Googling only “girlfriend” on Image Search, that’s how important Google think Avril is. Or is it perhaps just the fact that Google consider her to be girlfriend material? I guess we’ll never know. But sorry Google, denied.