Measuring the Information Society 2012

In last Thursday's fascinating CGCS lecture, Digital Innovation for International Development, Martin Hilbert referred to the International Telecommunication Union Report, Measuring the Information Society 2012 which presents two authoritative benchmarking tools to monitor information society developments worldwide. From the report launch:

The first of these is the ICT Development Index, the IDI, which combines 11 different indicators into one single measure to track progress made in ICT access, use and skills.

The IDI measures the level of ICT developments in 155 economies worldwide, presents country rankings, and compares progress made between the end of 2010 and the end of 2011.

The second is the ICT Price Basket, the IPB, which combines fixed-telephone, mobile-cellular and fixed-broadband Internet tariffs for 165 economies into one measure, and ranks countries based on the 2011 tariffs, and in relation to income levels. It also compares tariffs over the four-year period from 2008 to 2011.

The report also features new data and analysis on revenue and investment in the ICT sector.

This 213-page report is required reading for anyone interested in the global information society--especially in terms of equality/disparity issues.  

New at Penn: WARC

Penn Libraries has recently added WARC to its rich collection of business intelligence resources. WARC is an international marketing database that includes over 6,000 marketing case studies as well as trend analysis, research reports, and other business intelligence information,  For media industry researchers it is chock full of useful and timely reports and data.

WARC stands for World Advertising Research Center. It has been around since 1985 and is also the publisher of International Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research and International Journal of Market Research (available from the Penn Libraries e-resources). If you do literature searches on media effects, persuasion, or communication campaigns it is not unusual to pull up articles in the advertising and marketing realm in journals such as these. Let's just say these folks care about persuasion like nobody's business (pun intended).

WARC's Data section contains advertising expenditure data from 80 global markets, a comparison of global media costs (compare costs by market, medium, target audience and time period), Adspend forecasts for 12 key countries, and a wide range of media usage statistic, including TV viewing data from over 70 countries and time spent by media comparisons (television, radio, internet, newspapers, magazines and cinema) in 10 non-US markets.

WARC's Topic section is useful for sifting out soft drink and automotive reports from reports in Media and Entertainment, or Telecoms, to mention the categories of most interest to communication researchers. 

The Industry Trends section has a Media/Tech category where you can find such articles as Cloud Gaming: What the End of the Console Means for Gamers, Brands and the Global Gaming Industry (August 2012). 

Tracking Telecom Issues

The Telecommunications Industry Association, TIA, has a very useful, information-packed website. Though this is a member-site of over 600 telecommunications companies from around the world, it also serves up a fair amount of free content to the general public. Look for the annual Standards and Technology Annual Report (STAR) (which they've been posting since 2001).

You can also follow what's going on at the FCC with the TIA Legislative Tracker and the TIA Regulatory Tracker. The June 2011 Regulatory Tracker, for instance, boasts 198 pages of up to date information on regulatory policy.

And while TIA's 2011 ICT Market Review & Forecast may be prohibitively expensive, the previous year's report is free for download, as are older white papers and the like. So even at the TIA Store most items are free.

Benton Foundation

The Benton Foundation is a private foundation in existence since 1948 that works in the areas of public policy, specifically serving the public interest in the media and telecommunications arena.
Current priorities include Current priorities include: "promoting a vision and policy alternatives for the digital age in which the benefit to the public is paramount; raising awareness among funders and nonprofits on their stake in critical policy issues; enabling communities and nonprofits to produce diverse and locally responsive media content."

They are worth pointing out on a library resource blog because their site is resource rich. Homepage sections includes Recent Headlines (free, daily summaries of articles on telecommunications policy), Policy Initiatives (on such topics as media ownership, affordable broadband, and other communication legislation), digital Beat Blog (Charles Benton and others' take on communications policy), and Community Media (the foundations work in educating nonprofits in this area) and more.

The Library and Topics sections are full of annual reports, research papers, news articles, and postings on a variety of topics in the areas of advertising, broadcasting, cable, children and media, community media, cyberwarfare and cybersecurity, digital content, digital divide, diversity, elections and media, emergency communication, energy and climate, FCC reform, health and media, indecency regulation, internet/broadband, journalism, labor, localism, media ownership, satellite, spectrum, telecom, violence, and wireless.

International Communications Market Report 2008

The International Communications Market Report 2008, published by Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, is now available.

From the report's forward:

This is Ofcom’s third report on developments in international communications markets. Putting the UK market into an international context is becoming increasingly important, as communications service provision globalises and as technological innovation breaks down traditional national market boundaries.

This report sets out the availability, take-up and use of communications services among seven main comparator countries (the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the US, Canada and Japan). Where data are available, we have included a further five European countries (Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and the Republic of Ireland). We also consider separately the development of communications markets in the large emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

This year, we have put yet more emphasis on the importance of convergence by setting out a number of converging market themes. These demonstrate that as content and services are distributed to consumers over a variety of digital networks, and to many different devices, consumer behaviour towards communications services is changing – for example, their concurrent use of different media such as the internet and television. We have also included more time-series data this year on how, across our larger comparator countries, consumer attitudes towards communications services are evolving.

We are publishing this report to help fulfil our commitment to continually research markets, to inform our policy thinking and to fulfil the commitment we made in our 2008/09 annual plan. It complements the other research that has been published by Ofcom in 2008, and forms part of the Communications Market trilogy – together with The UK Communications Market (published in August 2008) and The Communications Market: Nations and Regions (May 2008). [These reports can be found at the Research and Market Data section of the website.]

The reference period of this report is the five years to the end of 2007. Consequently, our analysis does not fully take account of changing economic conditions over the past twelve months.

The Incunabula of Telecommunications

In the latest Communication Booknotes Quarterly Christopher Sterling has put together something very cool, a bibliography of books called "Who's on First? Pioneering Books on Telegraph, Telephone, Wireless, Radio, Television, and Facsimile." The list includes both the first books that appear on a subject and the most important early books, "indeed," according to Sterling, "some of these titles represent the 'incunabula' of telecommunications--at least in English." The bibliography includes such firsts as: the first book on the transatlantic cable, first English monograph on the telegraph, first book on the microphone, first English language book devoted to the wireless, first scholarly history of U.S. broadcasting, first book about the radio audience based on social science, first book on broadcasting law published in English, first college text on broadcasting, first college textbook on television, first book devoted to radio drama, first book on educational radio, first general interest book in America on broadcasting, first American book to discuss the impact of television on society, first book on educational television, first English language book devoted to television, first history of television, and first book about policy aspects of the television business in the U.S. There are 56 titles in the bibliography.

Communication Booknotes Quarterly is available online from the main Library webpage. The quarterly reviews books, reports, and electronic publications on all aspects of mass communications, telecommunication, and the information industry.