I’m amazed by the wide range of reaction yesterday to the survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Reading the reaction among the meme-makers I found out that the social web is a bust, with “far fewer participants than its architects would have us believe”,  that it is a playground for a small minority of geeks, that its upside has a very low ceiling, that active 20-something Web 2.0 participants will abandon their behavior when they become busy in their 30s.

I also found out that “the study is a powerful indication that the social Internet is thriving and getting adopted by a broad spectrum of society rather than an elite group”, that the mainstream media is hostile to the Internet and has mischaracterized the Pew survey,  and that the low numbers of adults who have engaged in podcasting represents an opportunity, not a failure.

It seems like everybody with a dog in the fight is anxious to spin the survey. I won’t recap the results. They’ve worked over by the digerati for the past 24 hours. Furthermore you can read the full results for yourself. But I will suggest that readers think about a few things:

First, the data in the Pew survey is a year old. That might not mean much, but than again it may. In a year on the Internet enormous changes can occur.

Second, I’m increasingly skeptical about the value of traditional market research phone surveys that extrapolate out from small samples (around 4,000 respondents in this case). In the old world of mass media, when consumers had few choices, it was easy to conduct a survey of, say, a small number of network TV viewers and extrapolate out national numbers. But in a million channel universe in which consumers have almost infinite choices, the behavior of any given 1000 users may not reflect the behavior of any other 1000.

Finally, I don’t think that Pew’s attempt to segment the market is all that valuable–less valuable even than Forrester’s ladder—there’s too much overlap between categories, and the criteria that divide categories are a mix of measurable behavior and attitude. The segmentation is more confusing than illuminating. Market segments are like jokes–if you have to spend an hour explaining them they’re not working. What is a “productivity enhancer”? How is such people different from “mobile centrics”?

But there’s lot of valuable and interesting, demographic information at the end of the Pew survey. Some of it’s unsurprising–college educated, upper income, men are the most avid Web 2.0 participants. Omnivores, who “have the most information gadgets and services which they use voraciously to participate in cyberspace….,” have the youngest median age (28) among Pew’s strata. And among people with 10 years of online experience there are differing attitudes toward technology, but similar behaviors at least with respect to Internet data usage, although only the so called “omnivores (8%) are avid users of digital media entertainment technology.

The most interesting comments I’ve seen on the report today date come from Curtiss Thompson at 9:01am:

Their findings clearly show that despite adults accessibility and capability to use various forms of technology for communications purposes, very few engage in public forms of communication. They instead use private means of communication, such as cell phone text messaging and online instant messaging. This seems to be indicative of the generational divide, where the older generations value their personal privacy far more than the younger generations, who actively engage in social networking sites that broadcast personal information and communication in a more public manner.

And from Mathew Ingram:

I was pleasantly surprised to find how *many* people engage in “Web 2.0″-type activities. The study says that when asked about things that include blogging, posting comments to a blog, uploading photos or video, creating webpages or mixing and mashing content from other sites, 37 per cent of those surveyed said they had done at least one of those things.

What’s not to like about a number like that? I was expecting the proportion to be much smaller — along the lines of the emerging 1-9-90 rule of thumb for social media, where about one per cent of people create content, 9 or 10 per cent consume it and about 90 per cent couldn’t care less about it. I find the fact that almost 40 per cent of people blog, upload photos, post comments and so on cause for considerable optimism.

Two final notes worth considering. If 37% of American adults have engaged in at least some Web 2.0 behavior, that means 83 million people over 18 have either posted to a blog, tagged a photo, or watched a YouTube video. That’s a big number. Also, the numbers for podcasting in the report are atrocious, even among the most elite users. If podcasting where a stock, I’d short it.

Link Love:

Me.com Launches a Ning Competitor

Photobucket Was a Steal

New Bill to Give Bloggers Same Shield Law Protection as Journalists