Demographics of early adoptors
May 11th, 2008 Print this
The State Library of Western Australia has been quietly offering free wireless for the past couple of months, ENABLEnet - Free wifi at the State Library of WA.
A comment about the demographics using the service stopped me in my tracks. It made me realise that I probably don’t know the profile of early adopters nearly as well as I presume:
The biggest surprise from the statistics is the language of the devices connecting, a third are English, a third Chinese, 17% Korean, 8% French, 3% German, 3% Japanese and the remaining 3% other European languages. This is due to the large number of international students who use the library to study and that the library is close to a number of backpacker hostels. One of our regular users can even connect from her hostel room.
Are they early adopters? Using free wifi access points is a new concept in _Australia_, but is it that strange in those countries?
I know that the international students always had the coolest gadgets when I was at Uni.
Too right Myles.
We’re trialling a library specific FF extension and creating a google gadget in my library and were trying to profile the target audience so we could work out where to put the links to these in our web site. Realised we didn’t really know who (if anyone) wd be likely to access them … but until your comment I didn’t really consider that maybe this is all old hat and outdated to some of our clients - and if so, to what proportion?