User>Driven Demographics

This site promotes the concept of user-driven product development, the process of involving users directly in the creation and improvement of your product to ensure it solves their problems. Another (increasingly popular) definition of "user-driven" is the Web 2.0 notion of participation in the online world by everyday people in discussion forums, blogs, social network sites, podcasts, etc. In many cases, large businesses like YouTube have grown up entirely around user-generated content.

BusinessWeek has an interesting chart (based on Forrester data) showing which demographic groups participate more or less in these kinds of activities. Generally, you'll see that younger people have adopted Web 2.0 in greater numbers than their elders. This is unsurprising, of course, as they have adopted the Internet itself, email, and even computers much more readily than older folks who didn't grow up with them.

It's interesting, though, that people who create content (bloggers, podcasters) or who comment on or rate other people's content have a much broader profile across ages than those who use social networking sites. Also, use of RSS is quite low across the board, but it doesn't seem to have much of an age bias at all.