Image by Peachtree Media Advisors

Generation Y, also known as the millennials, are the young adults composed of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and some Gen X'ers. They're the biggest generation since the Boomers now and will eventually outpace them in numbers.

There has been much scrutiny over this generation over the past couple of years as the first set of Gen Y'ers began to enter the business world. The tech-savviness of these "digital natives," as they're called, has some corporations scrambling to adapt their systems to the incoming masses of these plugged in, always-on multitaskers. Consultants who specialize in Gen Y are being brought in to teach the older execs what to expect from the new hires, how to motivate them, how to retain them, etc. It's almost as if the Gen Y'ers were some sort of alien creature that business world was completely unprepared for.

We recently ran down a list of reasons why Gen Y is different from the rest of us. Besides the obvious connection to technology, they also have unique perspectives on marketing, media, the workplace, and society...at least, that's what the pundits tell us.

On paper, the millennials sound like a revolutionary generation dead set on changing the status quo. Their insubordination at work is only due to their lack of buy in - "Generation Why" always need to know "why" something's being done. Their brand loyalty is completely up for sale - they're quick to move to the next big thing. They've cut back on TV viewing so they can listen to music or play video games. They're socially conscious and think they're a force to be reckoned with in politics. Oh yes, surely these kids are different.   

...Or Are They?

But unbeknownst to them, Gen Y is about to be put to the test. Simply put, they're going to be watched closely to see if they show up at the polls. Will they turn out in record numbers? Will the pundits be proven right? Will Gen Y change the world?

The truth is...well, we hope so. But let's be honest here - while the youth turnout will likely be higher than in 2004's election thanks to some savvy web policking and the clear differences between the candidates making the choice easier, we're probably not going to see record numbers. The highest youth turnout ever was 55%, recorded in 1972. If we match that number or go higher, then we know we have a true force of change on our hands. If we don't, then we're going to have to face facts: it may be back to business as usual.

If the pundits have, in fact, hyped Gen Y a bit beyond what they deserve, then this young generation may be less-ground shaking when it comes to the other aspects of their personalities and behaviors, too. People could start to think, "hmmm, maybe they aren't that different after all."

The Future Web Will Be Built By Us...All Of Us

If big business takes a step back and realizes that Gen Y isn't this devastatingly different type of employee, if marketers realize they can catch their attention using more standard methods, if media companies think that Gen Y will happily buy music wrapped in DRM, then the tech world could feel the impacts.

Here in the the tech industry, a lot of folks have been counting on Gen Y to lead the way when it comes to change. Concepts like Enterprise 2.0, social media marketing, Twitter for customer service...these are all movements that have been, at least in part, designed to address the needs of these new, young digital natives.

If this "record-breaking" generation doesn't vote (read: doesn't care), then we may have to face the truth: the kids are alright, but they're still just kids...and maybe they're not as different as we once thought. Maybe they aren't going to guide us to the new world of web 3.0 and cloud computing all on their own. Maybe we'll find the way ourselves...all of us, together.

We may have to realize that the true force of change that's happening both online and off is the same as it ever was: early adopters enthusiastically adopt a product or service and, over time, it trickles down to the rest of the mainstream. This isn't a revolution, it's just par for the course, and it's nowhere near as exciting as a brigade of digitally adept youth who stormed the polls iPhones in hand ready to change the world.

Image credits: miss karen

Kid Rock

Kid Rock, ono of the last hold-outs with regards to digital music distribution (and especially iTunes), has signed an exclusive deal with music service Rhapsody to distribute his albums. In contrast to Weird Al, however, Kid Rock insists that consumers can only download full albums and not just choose specific songs.

Are Both Missing the Point?

In some ways, it seems both musicians are missing the point of digital distribution. Weird Al does an exclusive deal with iTunes, even though he has a big enough name to either give his songs away for free or to sell them himself, and Kid Rock is trying to go against his own fans' wishes by not allowing a la carte downloading. Then, of course, diamond-studded swimming pools don't grow on trees either...

While the options are appreciated, a certain restriction that comes with the music files is not. To help music labels combat piracy, digital music providers such as iTunes and Yahoo introduced DRM restricted music files to consumers. Today, Wal-Mart has given consumers the number 1 reason as to why DRM was the worst thing ever.

Customers of Wal-Mart's digital music service will be in for a big shock very soon, just as Yahoo Music customers were. Wal-Mart has announced that they will shut down their DRM servers on October 9th. What does this mean for Wal-Mart digital music buyers?

If you have purchased protected WMA music files from our site prior to Feb 2008, we strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer.

Beginning October 9, we will no longer be able to assist with digital rights management issues for protected WMA files purchased from Walmart.com. If you do not back up your files before this date, you will no longer be able to transfer your songs to other computers or access your songs after changing or reinstalling your operating system or in the event of a system crash. Your music and video collections will still play on the originally authorized computer.

DRM restrictions ties all of your songs to your computer. To sum things up, customers will now have to back-up all of their downloads or risk losing them all. Because of the DRM restrictions on these files, you won't be able to transfer their music anywhere else. If you were to reinstall your operating system or simply purchase a new computer, Wal-Mart's shutdown of their DRM server would prevent you from taking your music somewhere else.

Talk About a Waste of Money

We're hoping Wal-Mart will do the right thing and refund customers a portion of the money spent, as Yahoo did when Yahoo Music shutdown. While the gaming community has been able to teach gaming publishers a lesson about DRM, we don't think anyone can provide a solution for the situation that Wal-Mart customers are going through.Will DRM-free music matter to consumers now?

To be in to win, leave a comment on last100 listing your top five digital lifestyle products and/or services.

• iPod touch
• BBC iPlayer (for iPhone/iPod touch)
• PlayStation 3
• Zattoo (Live TV on a PC)
• Pandora (Internet radio)

My current top 5 is:

• iPhone
• last.fm
• iPod / iTunes
• Playstation 3
• Skype

Certainly those things are contributing factors to your digitally encoded self, however, this recent EMC-sponsored study discovered that your digital footprint includes far more than just the data related to individual actions.

Out of the 281,000,000,000 GB digital universe, each person's contribution is about 45 GB, and out of that 45 GB, only about half of the digital footprint would be related to these "active" individual actions - taking pictures, making VoIP calls, uploading videos, downloading content, etc.

Awareness of those sorts of self-created data trails has been steadily increasing according to a recent PEW Internet report (Dec. 2007), with nearly half of all internet users (47%) having searched for information about themselves, up 22% from 2002.

But this new research shows that we need to be aware of much more than just online mentions. What we need to concern ourselves with now, is the other half of our digital footprint. This "ambient content," the research team concluded, comprises of passive contributions, something termed as your "digital shadow."

Your shadow includes things like images of you on a surveillance camera, your bank records, your retail and airline purchase records, your telephone records, your medical database entries, copies of hospital scans, information about your web searches, general backup data, information about credit card purchases, etc.

John Gantz, Chief Research Officer and Senior Vice President of IDC explains the digital shadow as simply "information about you," but what's surprising about this shadow, he explains, is that "for the first time your digital shadow is larger than the digital information you actively create about yourself."

While for you this means being aware of the numerous places your information is stored to protect yourself from identity theft, for businesses, especially enterprise IT organizations that gather this information, it means a tremendous responsibility for the security, privacy protection, reliability and legal compliance of this information.

"Society is already feeling the early effects of the world’s digital information explosion. Organizations need to plan for the limitless opportunities to use information in new ways and for the challenges of information governance," said Joe Tucci, EMC Chairman, President and CEO. "As people’s digital footprints continue growing, so too will the responsibility of organizations for the privacy, protection, availability and reliability of that information. The burden is on IT departments within organizations to address the risks and compliance rules around information misuse, data leakage and safeguarding against security breaches."

If you're interested in the current size of your own digital footprint, you can download a copy of the Personal Digital Footprint Calculator. This tool walks you through a questionnaire that calculates your impact based on the responses to questions about your computer usage, email usage, digital camera/camcorder usage, web downloading habits, potential surveillance areas, and geographical information, among other things. The questions do make you think about your online activities, but they may be hard to answer if you're not really aware of your online activities or good at coming up with averages for things like "number of emails sent per week," for example.

Digital Footprint Calculator

However, if you take the time to fill out the Digital Footprint Calculator correctly, you'll be presented with your current "daily digital footprint," in megabytes. You can then click "Start Ticker" to launch your own personal ticker that increments over time according to your digital information creation. You can even upload this, along with the .swf file, to your own web site and share your results with others.

Example Ticker (taking wizard defaults)

Having a digital shadow is not necessarily a bad thing, the study points out, as it's what allows Amazon to make recommendations for you or display your "trustworthiness" as a seller on eBay, the downside is that, in many cases, erasing that shadow is still difficult or impossible: think about the Facebook user rebellion that took place when it was discovered how difficult/impossible it was to remove your profile from the service.

But there are other examples of where people have even less choice in the matter, like government-mandated traffic light cameras or citywide surveillance. And of course, your safety is at the mercy of credit card companies and the like - if they aren't taking security seriously, your digital shadow can be snatched away from you while an identity thief goes on a a rampage with your good name.

In the long run, it will be up to businesses to adapt to these changes and protect their customer's data. Those that don't will pay as their clients take their business to safer, more protective businesses elsewhere. And for us, just being aware of our impact on the digital universe is a good place to start.

Blogdigger started at around the same time as ReadWriteWeb (we began publishing April 2003) and it was one of the first RSS-based blog search engines. I first corresponded with Greg Gershman around the time we started our respective endeavours. Over the past 5 years Blogdigger has been one of the less high profile blog search companies around - but even so we've often compared it to Technorati and Feedster. In 2005, Blogdigger diversified from blog content to focus more on digital media. At that time it launched a media search product, to extract and index media content from blog content - including audio, video, and images. Blogdigger has also experimented with Groups and Local apps.

This acquisition by Odeo is probably as much about hiring the talent of Gershman than it is about Blogdigger. The acquisition figure isn't being divulged. However Gershman was pretty frank about Blogdigger's fortunes over the past 5 years, admitting that their better funded competition (notably Technorati) have dominated the blog search sector. This sector has also had its high profile failures, it should be noted - Feedster and PubSub among them.

How Blogdigger Has Fared Over 5 Years

I admire the way Blogdigger has diversified through the years and consistently sought out new niches within blog search. The digital media part of its business is what, in the end, differentiated Blogdigger from the crowd. It's worth reading Greg's story in full, below, as it provides an informative glimpse into how a small, unfunded startup has battled through 5 years and finally had a successful conclusion (well, we hope the price paid can be deemed a success). And remember that Blogdigger, like this blog, launched well before the web 2.0 hype began. Here's Greg's story:

"Regarding Blogdigger: as the blog search space grew more crowded, we tried a few different approaches to keep Blogdigger relevant. One was to expand into various other blog search applications, such as media search and local search. Media search really had the most traction, due to some of the search partnerships we had with sites like Webjay and Ourmedia. At our peak we were serving over 100,000 pages a day (not including RSS feeds; our RSS searches have continued to grow over the years, we now service about 400K searches a day). Since those partnerships went away, we've lost a good portion of our traffic, but, strangely, our revenues are about the same, only slightly lower (not in proportion to our traffic decrease). We still have a good number of users (our stats are on Quantcast), and some good partnerships, including powering the search for Jurist, a blog project run out of the University of Pittsburgh's Law School.

We've also licensed to market intelligence and monitoring services, and are hoping to continue to grow this in the future. Due to various factors (some of which were that we never raised any outside funding for the site, also as a differentiator) we moved away from trying to index all the blogs on the web, to making sure that our index was as spam-free and duplicate-free as possible. The goal is that when you look for information, you get good results each time. This has proved beneficial in attracting partners to syndicate our results on their sites, which in turn has helped us build traffic to Blogdigger."

Congratulations Greg and team. And we look forward to the new Odeo, which we will be checking out soon.