A reader asks: I remember several years ago reading about some measure of customer satifaction by industry. Do you know what I’m talking about and if it still exists?

Yes, as a matter of fact, we do.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index has been around since the mid-90’s. They report scores on a 0-100 scale at the national level and produce indexes for 10 economic sectors, 43 industries (including e-commerce and e-business) and more than 200 companies and federal or local government agencies. In addition to the company-level satisfaction scores, ACSI produces scores for the causes and consequences of customer satisfaction and their relationships. The measured companies, industries, and sectors are broadly representative of the U.S. economy serving American households.

See industry scores here.

A reader asks:
Bits, bytes. I’ve never had the nerve to ask anyone what they really are. But since this is anonymous, what are they?

We’re glad you asked.

Coincidently, we just read The Expanding Digital Universe, a March 2007 white paper by IDC. Excerpts below are pulled straight from there… So they get credit for the answer. We just get credit for knowing where to find it.

WHAT ARE BITS AND BYTES?
A “bit” is the smallest unit of information that can be stored in a computer, and consists of either a 1 or 0 (or on/off state). All computer calculations are in bits. A “byte” is a collection of 8 bits. Bytes are convenient because, when converted to computer code, they can represent 256 characters, such as numbers or letters. So a byte is 8 times larger than a bit. Common aggregations for bytes come in multiples of 1,000, such as kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, and so on. The progression is as follows:

Bit (b) 1 or 0
Byte (B) 8 bits
Kilobyte (KB) 1,000 bytes
Megabyte (MB) 1,000 KB
Gigabyte (GB) 1,000 MB
Terabyte (TB) 1,000, GB
Petabyte (PB) 1,000 TB
Exabyte (EB) 1,000 PB
Zettabyte (ZB) 1,000 EB

This seems simple enough, except sometimes multiples of bytes are considered as powers of 2, since the original machine language only has two states, 1 or 0. A kilobyte would then be 210 bytes, or 1,024 bytes. A megabyte would be 220 bytes, or 1,024 kilobytes, and so on.

For the sake of simplicity, in all calculations for this research we used the decimal system we mentioned first.

And now that you have that under your belt, check this out:

• In 2006, the amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated was 1,288 x 1018 bits. In computer parlance, that’s 161 exabytes or 161 billion gigabytes. This is about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written.

• Between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually to the digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes.

Jinkies. Those are some big numbers. See you again for the next Stump the Researcher!

A reader asks: I am fascinated by all these social networking sites. How can I find a network where I can ‘hang out’ with other bird-watching enthusiasts?

We don’t suppose you mean The Orioles, huh? Thought not. Read on for the answer…

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This Field Guide: Birds of the World group on Flickr has over 3,000 members and over 33,000 photos and substantial discussion. There are strict rules — this is serious business.

You can submit your birding info, analyze your personal birding info, and analyze other public birding info in eBird. Registration is required.

Perhaps a teeny bit off topic, but really interesting: BirdJam is a company that integrates bird watching with iPods. With BirdJam, any North American bird song can be found within 15 seconds from the easily-accessed playlists organized by habitat and family. Call me a geek (okay, you didn’t really have to do that) but I think that’s really cool.

And sure, there are forums all over the place – like on Birder’s World, for example.

Can’t find the kind of network you want? Make your own! (listen carefully – this is really, really neato…)

You can create a full social network that you can customize and brand as your own. It’s true. Check out Ning. It has a full suite of capabilities for photos, videos, discussions, blogs, privacy settings… you name it, Ning has it.

We can think of some really great ways to use this tool… anyone want to join a research social network?

A reader asks: I hear a lot about how many blogs there are – one stat said a new blog every ½ second or some such number. But how many blogs are ACTIVE and how many get started and stall out? Also, while you’re at it, is there any way of ranking a blog’s “goodness”. Like some sort of ranking? And if so, what is that ranking based on? Man, I’m FULL of questions!

You ARE full of questions! Or something… (hee hee)

Here goes:

Steve Rubel pointed out a report recently from Microsoft. It says that almost 75% of Blogger’s blogs are Spam Blogs or splogs. Yikes. That is a lot. And while the methodology is disputed by some, there is no arguing that there are a lot them – splogs, that is.

According to David Sifry (founder of Technorati) last October (new report in new format coming soon):

• Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs.
• Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.
• Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days.
• About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts.
• About 4% of new splogs get past Technorati’s filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
• There is a strong correlation between the aging and post frequency of blogs and their authority and Technorati ranking.
• The globalization of the blogosphere continues. Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant language, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized.
• Coincident with a rise in blog posts about escalating Middle East tensions throughout the summer and fall, Farsi has moved into the top 10 languages of the blogosphere, indicating that blogging continues to play a critical role in debates about the important issues of our times.

We believe that there are substantially more than 57 million blogs. A year ago, The Blog Herald said there were 200 million. Wow. But there are few new reports about this and, frankly, it’s just so hard to get accurate statistics when it changes by the minute and there is no one way to count.

How to find the good ones? Well, Technorati has a good tool. You do the search and then choose how much authority you want to filter by — little, none, a lot — and it narrows the search. We’ve found it to be very useful.

Or you could ask us. We’ll help you find the relevant blogs you need. The best way we’ve found is to use great search techniques to narrow and then read, read, read.

A reader asks: I’m not a visual guy. But I need to create charts and visuals to make my concepts clearer for my presentations. Like I said, this does not come easy to me. I’ve seen Ven Diagrams, Pyramids, Flow Charts. But are there others?

Answer: Are there ever!

We recently found about the coolest collection ever.
Check out the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.

Let it load. It takes a minute. Then run your cursor over each part of the table. You’ll see a neato flash window with an example of the visualization method. It gave us some great ideas and we bet it will do the same for you.

A few are:
Radar Chart
Scatterplot
Concentric Circles
Cognitive Mapping
Tree
Metro Map
Histogram
Continuum
Magic Quadrant
Failure Tree
Value Chain
S-Cycle

Well, you get the picture!

A reader asks: I’ve been pondering hair. It’s so weird, hair is. Dead protein. That’s all it is. Do you know how much money is spent each year trying to get you to spend your paycheck on products to make your dead protein look better? Me either. But I bet it is a lot. How about a ballpark figure here?

First of all, ad spending on hair care products is expected top $1 billion this year, according to Advertising Age. That’s a lot of advertising.

U.S. Shampoo sales were up 0.7% to $620.3 million for the 52 weeks ending Sept. 10, according to Information Resources Inc., Chicago. Meanwhile, sales of conditioner were up 3.5% in supermarkets to $360.3 million for the same period.

My favorite quote from the research “Hair care was flat for a while” okay, I thought it was funny.

One more piece of info:

According to IRI, hairspray sales in the US were about $367 million last year and US gel and mousse sales were $581 million.

Add them all together? It’s almost $2 billion a year. And this doesn’t include hair color. That’s $2 billion on its own.

(And AdAge estimates the ENTIRE hair market at $8 billion, but that includes unmeasured channels, which always makes me go hmmmm….)

A reader asks: I was following a blog on Carepages where this guy had some pithy quote from pop culture almost every day. No one remembers all those lines! How can I be as cool as Steve?

Oh, reader. You probably can’t be quite as cool as he is. But here are some suggestions…

Check out Quotegeek. Very fun.

We ran a search on HOPE. Found these (among others…)

Red: Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.
Movies > The Shawshank Redemption

Gloria: Joanie, you are now a world-class hopeless romantic.Joan Wilder: No, hopeful. Hopeful romantic.
Movies > Romancing the Stone

Man can’t help hoping even if he is a scientist. He can only hope more accurately.
Love Against Hate
Personalities > Karl Menninger

For you patient searchers (you know who you are!) try Fagan Finder’s Quote Search. Here there are 20 or 30 different quote search engines to try! It’s hard to imagine you won’t find something good here.

We’re always looking for great research quotes. We know. It’s not the most fascinating subject to everyone. So as an experiment, we tried some of the engines…

From Quotez

Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.
Wernher von Braun

From Board of Wisdom

one of our all time favorites (you may have heard this from us before!)

Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from many, it’s research.
Wilson Mizner

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
Albert Einstein

From Said What

Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.
David Ogilvy

Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
Marston Bates

And if you’re more in the mood for a good cliche, check out Cliche Finder.

Until next time!

A reader (okay fine, Wendy’s mother) asked:You’re always telling me that there are blogs that I’d want to read. How do you expect me to find them?I want to read about genealogy.
One easy way to find some starting points is to use the Google Blogsearch. For this, I typed in genealogy and the top results were:

Genealogy and How – Daily blog of online genealogy records and databases
Genealogy Blog – Genealogy on the Internet :: Today and Everyday
Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter – The DAILY newsletter for genealogy consumers, packed with straight talk – hold the sugar coating – whether the vendors like it or not! Check…
RssGenealogy.com – Latest Genealogy News – One source for all the latest genealogy news
The Genealogy Guys Podcast – George G. Morgan and Drew Smith discuss genealogy! Their podcast is the longest-running, continuous genealogy podcast

Then, when you start reading the first one, Genealogy and How, you’ll see the blogroll is:

Dick Eastman
GenealogyBlog
GenealogyToday
RSS Genealogy
About Genealogy
Olive Tree
The Paper Trail
Ancestors at Rest
Family Bibles
Canadian Lib Genie
Family & Local Histories
Interment.net Blog
Death Records Blog

If you go to RSS Genealogy, you’ll find 63 feeds. Wow.

You get the picture. What takes time is figuring out which ones matter. Which are worth reading. But if you pick a trail and follow it, you are bound to find some interesting and worthwhile sites.

There are other ways to go about this, as well. You can find articles in trade publications, consumer magazines…even newspapers…that talk about respected blogs.

What you’ll find is that in any category, there are blogs that are linked to most often. These are worth checking out, for sure.

You can go to Alexa and see what the traffic is for specific blogs. If it’s wildly popular, check it out.

(And of course, there are many blog search engines and directories! So don’t get too tied down to Google. Some swear by Technorati, some Blogdigger. And some really interesting metasearches like Talk Digger. I bet we revisit that one soon – it’s really neat.)

So go crazy! And try not to get too distracted by all the interesting things you find off-topic!

A reader asks: I’ve been reading about CEO’s and blogging. Like this article BusinessWeek a few months back; but also tidbits in some of my daily reading. So how can I find out which CEOs really are blogging?

One great place to start is The NewPR/Wiki’s CEO Blog List. Listed by country, this list is constantly updated.

You can check out the CEO Blog Watch blog…..

The Fortune 500 Business Blog Wiki… or the Fortune 500 Blog Project.

A loyal reader asks: I know I should know what they are, but what the heck are hedge funds? I keep hearing that the growth is huge. Yeah, tell me about that too.So glad you asked.

We have a great source for these types of questions – financial trends and the like.

The Financial Services Fact Book 2007 Make a note of it. You’ll need this one day. Don’t worry, though. If you forget, you can always ask us…
This from the Fact Book:

Hedge funds are private investment pools subject to the terms of investment agreements between the sponsors of, and investors in, the hedge fund. While mutual funds typically have a minimum opening investment of about $1,000, hedge fund investors are often required to have a minimum investment of $1 million.

ASSETS OF HEDGE FUNDS, 1950-2006 (1)($ billions)
(1) All data are for January.Source: Hennessee Group LLC.