How do you think women's surfing habits differ from men's? This makes me think of the guys in my office who would quite happily sit playing on a Wap site for half a day trying to set up their Wap phones. I don't think any woman I know would bother doing that. A woman's view is that she'll use Wap when it works. Women are less tolerant in their surfing habits and less likely to meander around.
How much will unmetered access change surfing habits in the UK? Not having to worry about the cost of surfing will benefit people who are cash poor and time rich such as students and children. Given that most people connected at the moment are ABC1 demographic then an extra 10 minutes online at the weekend isn't going to make that much difference.
Is the net community generally less concerned with gender? The dotcom world tends to have teams who are younger and more liberal but at board level you can still find the old executives in grey suits. A lot of people feel everyone's taking the internet so seriously and trying so hard to make money out of it that a lot of the fun is going.
Can portals and websites ever create a real sense of community? Definitely. You can have a global, single-issue community. What the internet does best is put one fanatical person in touch with another fanatical person, whether it's pigeon fanciers, kite flyers or whatever.
How is the advent of broadband going to change things? It will enable internet publishers to move into the TV domain and it's going to allow a mass of richer content. So much of what we can do at the moment is limited to how long it might take to download.But it wouldn't suprise me if broadband ends up getting log-jammed too.
Will internet access via TV and mobile bring about a shift away from the PC? Not really because PCs will continue to develop. The one thing that puts me off the PC is how long it takes to start it up. That's a real barrier to people using the net as a reference tool. Once you get a PC that you can switch on quickly it will complement TV. They'll have different types of content delivered in different ways. If the instructions are long and boring then blokes will be playing with it and if it's really simple to use then women will.
Any favourite websites? It's a bit boring but I like Amazon because I'm an avid e-consumer and there are so few decent sites. Google is brilliant for finding specific information. Yahoo uses Google now and it seems to have the users' interest in mind. I use Jakob Nielsen's Alert Box a lot for usability issues.
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