Interesting discussion during Dave Brown’s Generation Y workshop at LIFT08. It seems asking a few teenagers how they use the Internet is always going to produce a few findings like these:

• Wikipedia is not seen as a very good/valuable source in school when it comes to usage in school work.
• They don’t like to buy online much and as a result don’t do it very often, whereas especially for these kids finance is not really a problem. It’s a trust issue.
• Although they consider their online friends and real friends to be the same (even if that’s talking about 300 people), the ‘real world’ is very important for them and don’t want to spend too much time online.
• Facebook is definitely still very hot! It’s used for planning of the immediate future and also for homework. Email within Facebook is used, but for totally different reasons as regular webmail such as Windows Live Hotmail.
• Last stunning fact: The images you find within the results of an image search are free to use for whatever reason, why else are they there? That’s the reaction when someone talked about Creative Commons. So we told them these images still are owned by someone and have some kind of copyright applied to it.

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We need such a panel on stage one of these days.

Another study revealing the obvious: downloads are what TV is to DVD: a free teaser that actually increases sales in the long run. This one from the Canadian government:

• When assessing the P2P downloading population, there was “a strong positive relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchasing. […] The study estimates that 12 additional P2P downloads per month increases music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.
• When viewed in the aggreggate (ie. the entire Canadian population) […] we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.”

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Why? Simple: people who download love music, and they will buy CDs for artists who make a real effort in making the object appealing (the only context in which it makes sense, because in an iPod world a CD is an obstacle to my wish to listen to my music), reward their favorite bands with “donations” (I bought CDs I had downloaded a large number of times) and gifts to others. A tune is a teaser, and a teaser is an occasion to get in touch. In our economy of attention this is all that matters. Music has a bright future. It simply needs to change.

Tokyo has unseated Paris as the world’s culinary capital.That’s according to Michelin Guides, the French bible of gastronomy, which announced a Tokyo edition Monday - its first outside Europe and the United States. Michelin’s Tokyo guide awarded 191 stars to 150 restaurants in the Japanese capital, the most number of stars awarded in any city. Previously, Paris had the most stars, at 65.Link

Somehow my dear readers will have to recognize the great magnanism of the French who create guides to shoot themselves in the foot. Time to kill a few more pre-conceived notions ;)

Apple’s stock price is going up, up, up into the $186 range - putting its market cap($161 Billion) above IBM ($156.45 Billion) for the first time in history.

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Hard to believe but true.