A survey conducted by Deloitte & Touche shows that of 2,081 consumers questioned, 38% watch television shows online, while 36% use their cell phones as entertainment devices, and 45% are creating online content such as websites, videos and blogs. The study, which was conducted between October 25-31 for American consumers, aims to look at the advertising potential of the web, television, and mobile devices.

While the full report hasn’t been released, I’m inclined to wonder what constitutes as mobile entertainment? It’s a rather broad statement to say that consumers use their cell phone as entertainment devices when this could mean that they play games that were pre-loaded on their phones, or that they text message friends using a mobile IM client.

As for the change over time, Deloitte & Touche conducted the same survey between February 23 and March 6, 2007. The results indicate that there’s a steady growth in usage across the three sectors looked at, with varying increases depending on age demographics. Consumers age 25-41 saw the largest increase for mobile entertainment use, up 47%, while those in the 13-24 age bracket saw a similar 46% increase.

As I noted briefly in a previous paragraph, one goal for this survey is to provide useful data to advertisers, as they need to go where the consumers are. So when Deloitte & Touche asked their consumers what type of ads were most effective, an 85% majority found television ads to work best on their buying habits but Internet ads were second best. 65% of the surveyed consumers felt that Internet ads have the most impact, beating out magazine ads, at 63%.

When it’s all said and done, Deloiite & Touche Vice Chairman and national sector leader, Ken August, smartly noted that advertising campaigns will need to have a multi-device strategy. How novel. Considering that this isn’t the only recent study to suggest the actual coming of true mobile social networking, advertisers have been ready for some time, testing the waters with heavily targeted campaigns through networks like AdMob.

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Today brings word that Netscape Navigator has finally reached the end of the road and will be discontinued by AOL in February. The first browser to gain mass popularity, Navigator has long since been surpassed by Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, with other upstarts like Safari, Opera, and Flock also claiming small pieces of the market. But, given my own memories of Navigator as my first Web browser, I thought I’d throw out a nostalgic poll question today:

What was your first Web browser?
• Lynx
• Mosaic
• Netscape Navigator
• Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox
• Something Else
View Results

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Metacafe has brought on former Yahoo and Disney executive Scott Bushman as its new Vice President of Business Development. Bushman will be making the connections that work for Metacafe, getting other media companies involved from around the world. This goes for licensing deals, and other “growth opportunities” for Metacafe.

Bushman brings along 15+ years of experience in media and entertainment, with his most recent position being that of senior director, business development, global publisher solutions at Yahoo, where he navigated and executed strategic distribution partnerships with major media partners across sports, music, television, gaming and social networks.

As Internet television grows, and as the influence of online video continues to take over Internet culture, we’ve seen several mergers and partnerships across content providers, distributors, major media companies and advertisers. I guessed some time ago that these mergers would continue, for consolidated distribution purposes, as certain techniques, technologies and players get weeded out.

But with the distribution options that the Internet provides media companies, it’s the partnerships that will help businesses like Metacafe grow. The desire for additional partnerships for growth and distribution is evident with Metacafe’s new addition to its executive team. Perhaps this could even lead to the fruition of Pete’s prediction that Metacafe would be acquired, albeit a year too late?

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The big holiday story this week was that Meneame and CoRank, two Digg-like sites, were set to be acquired by Digg. Mashable brought the story to the English-speaking blogosphere thanks to a tip-off from a Spanish reader, but mails to both companies confirmed that Digg was not involved. And today, the two sites announced a merger to form “Menearank”. Except that it’s all a big joke. Here’s a mail I received from CoRank yesterday, with the request that I kept things quiet until the joke played out:

Pete,

You may get tips that the news Meneame and coRank were to announce is that the two companies have merged. Don’t write anything about it.

Why? Today is December 28th (in the US is still 27th but in Spain it’s already 28th). Why is that significant? This day Spain celebrates the equivalent to April 1st in the US.

So now you know what happened. The oher day we tried to stir the Spanish blogosphere by both, Meneame and coRank saying “we have some big news coming up” before the actual “news” would come, but then some people started to speculate about the news being Digg acquiring both companies, someone tipped you about that, and then you know the rest.

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Netscape Navigator, once the dominant Web browser back in the 1990s, will no longer be supported as of February 1, 2008. In a posting to Netscape’s blog, Tom Drapeau writes:

“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.

AOL’s focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be.”

AOL originally acquired Netscape for $4.2 billion in November 1998, a landmark event in the first Web boom. For an interesting glimpse back in time, check out CNET’s original coverage of the deal.

In any event, what remains of Netscape now is a fairly generic portal that is co-branded with AOL. For a while, Netscape had re-modeled itself after social news site Digg, but that effort has since been re-branded as Propeller.

Nonetheless, Netscape will always have its place in history, especially for those of us that first found our way onto the Web in the 1990s. As I recall, my first Web browser was Netscape Navigator 2.0 which ran on an IBM personal computer that had a 133mhz processor with brand spankin’ new Windows ’95. Navigator made it all the way up to version 9, which launched in June of this year.

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2007 was a heck of a year here at Mashable. When the year got rolling, it was just Pete slogging away through all the news and press releases, but now there’s a whole team of us attempting to bring you the information you crave.

Throughout the year there were some standout stories based on any number of criteria. This list is a sampling of 30+ of the stories that shaped the year behind us. (more…)

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OK, this is fun. I just stumbled (via Digg) onto MPAA’s webpage where they link all the resources for legal downloading, buying or renting movies.

The fun part is that they managed to mess up all the links on the page. Sure, tech savvy folks will know where they messed up: instead of “a href=”dynamic.abc.go.com”” it should have been “a href=”http://dynamic.abc.go.com”“, but the poor average user will think that the evil MPAA is toying with him, and there aren’t any sites with legal movies for download out there.

And then he’ll go to the Pirate Bay and download the stuff he wants.

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The convergence of politics and new media has been a hot topic this year that will only intensify as we close in on the 2008 elections. The Politics Online Conference, coming on March 4th and 5th to Washington, DC, sits at the intersection of smart politics, good governance, transparent democracy and new media. The conference will spotlight tools, applications, strategies and ideas that affect a range of functions, from writing policy to organizing democratic movements to building dialogue with constituents.

For the full range of topics be sure to check out the conference agenda.

Exclusively for Mashable readers, we are offering a discount of $50 off the registration fee. Simply use the code MINUS50 on the registration form to receive the discount

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It’s probably not a coincidence that Godkut was launched a couple of days after Christmas; you can’t get better timing for a faith-based social network.

Unfortunately, and although Godkut calls itself “the world’s most advanced faith based Social Network,” I really can’t report anything out of the ordinary about it. It’s your standard, run of the mill social network with features like blogs, forums, chatrooms, events, classifieds, messaging, groups, and, of course, sharing music and video. One interesting feature is the video recorder, which allows for one-click video recording and saving the result directly to your profile.

The design of the site is lackluster; some elements, like polls, look like there were just slapped on there without any thought given on how it will all look like, and an ugly white banner on top isn’t doing the site any favors. I expect the users to be interested mostly in the content and not in the wrapping, so I’d give Godkut the benefit of a doubt; but all things considered, Godkut will probably be remembered as just another religious social network. Some other examples of faith-based social networks are MyChurch and Youthroots.

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FlickerFan is the latest offering from serial inventor David Winer. FlickrFan is essentially a screen saver program designed for displaying hi-rez images from Flickr accounts as well as RSS feeds that come with media enclosures (or in English, Photobucket, AP’ news wire and Flickr tag streams). The system is designed with the MacMini in mind, and only comes in Macintosh flavor - no cross-platform compatibility here.

The application, at first blush, appears fairly cool, despite the rather dry description an introduction on Winer’s blog. It puts into action something I’ve actually been doing for quite some time now, albeit in an expensive and apparently difficult way.

Keep in mind that I’m not a Mac guy. In fact, I’m about as anti-Mac as a person can be without being an Apple-hater and MS fanboy. Having properly disclaimed myself, I feel no compunctions in informing you that Dave Winer’s “game-changing program” has actually existed for almost two years, and it’s called Yahoo! Go.Since I’m not a Mac guy, and don’t actually have any Macs running here at the house, I had Kristen install the software so she could get some screen shots for me, and perhaps do a cute little PC vs. Mac square vs. hip review of the software. After she installed the software, though, her analysis was the it was “way to much work to install it,” and the process didn’t merit the rewards that the software delivered; it isn’t just me scratching my head wondering why all the wonderment in the blogosphere over this software.

Yahoo Go, at least the version I have running on the Asus MicroITX board that’s hooked up to my living-room big-screen, can display photos as a screen-saver from any RSS stream or from any Flickr stream. What’s more, I can display with a built in Windows screen saver all the photos saved on my own hard drive, and with any number of freely available screen-savers display images from other’s RSS feeds.

There are literally a hundred ways to skin this cat. I went through the laborious process of testing all of them as I decided on a home theatre PC back in early 2006, and Yahoo! Go was the most well-rounded solution for what I wanted at the time. Your mileage may vary.

If you absolutely, positively want new photos to display through your MacMini on your TV screen, Dave Winer’s software is designed specifically for that.

If your needs are separate from that very narrow niche, I’d find a more stable solution.

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