Boffins not bankrolled…brilliant…!

When I saw this headline from the BBC pop up in my RSS reader:

"Britain's digital tribes revealed
Academics classify every household in Britain according to their access to and use of technology"

I inevitably thought…”oh yeah, academics in the pay of which tech corporation..?” smacking, as it did, of any number of PR tactics rolled out since the birth of t’internet.

But no! To my delight, it literally is the boffins on their own; there doesn’t appear to be any commercial organisation involved at all. And it’s great…they’ve looked at electoral roll information and done lots of other number crunching and come up with 23 different categories of ‘e-type’ (not the classic Jaguar sports car) depending on access to technology. My favourite is Type A05: Too old to be bothered.

There’s even a tool where you put your postcode in and find out which type you are; or at least, which type most of the people in your neighbourhood are. So if you find that your postcode’s in the E-marginalised category but you think you’re an E-professional, the likelihood is that your computer’s going to get nicked. So it’s really useful.

Still, what I do know is that somewhere out there in tech PR land there’s an Account Director crying into his coffee this morning as he realises that the very expensive research project he’s halfway through for his second tier internet client has just gone tits up.