Celia's

So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube?

We’ve got answers to these questions and many more. A veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data lies in front of you. Using a variety of sources we’ve compiled what we think are some of the more interesting numbers that describe the Internet in 2011. From Royal Pingdom

From Celia: a few figures that caught my attention

Email

 19% – Percentage of spam emails delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters.

 71% – Percentage of worldwide email traffic that was spam (November 2011).

 40 – Years since the first email was sent, in 1971.

Internet users

  

  2.1 billion – Internet users worldwide.

 118.6 million – Internet users in Africa.

Subtitled, “We Aren’t in Kansas Anymore . . .,” the data Meeker presents paints a picture of an online world — literally. More users come from outside the US, more time is spent on social media in at least a dozen countries, and growth is largely occurring outside the US. However, with penetration of the Internet at 79% in the US, growth will come slower here. But not for mobile, which is growing very fast as 3G and 4G adoption accelerates.

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/10/20/mary-meekers-internet-trends-2011-global-mobile-and-immersive/

 

The latest Oxford Internet Survey has just been released. It refers to a next generation user as accessing the internet via portable devices and using several devices.
The survey also offers a snapshot of who uses the internet, how and why. http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/

From: LSE Library New Research

 

What stands in the way of bridging the digital chasm? By Adrian Craddock

Prior to the 2010 South Africa World Cup, submarine fibre optic cabling was laid to improve the speed and reliability of broadband. Despite this, Internet World Statistics reports that only 11.4% of Africans have internet access, far below the global average of 30.2%. Considering that a World Bank  study suggests every 10% of broadband penetration increases developing countries’ per capita GDP growth by 1.38%, the scarcity of Africa’s online network has significant economic repercussions.

According to Telecoms analyst Ovum, it is high prices that are standing in the way of bridging the digital divide. Senior Analyst Richard Hurst said: “Some countries have broadband pricing double or triple the price of an equivalent service in a more developed market.” Nigeria exemplifies this with broadband starting at $1,211 per year. Considering that the country’s  gross national income per capita is $1,180, only the highest socio-economic groups can afford broadband internet access.

Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum

Speaking at last month’s Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) in Ghana, independent IT consultant Mike Jensen blamed prices on a lack of competition. "There are few wholesale/carrier licenses issued and in some cases [there is] discrimination against new entrants," he said. A  report published by African IT expert Olof Hesselmark supports Jensen’s view. Hesselmark writes that many countries have state-run telecom monopolies that insist on remaining the sole suppliers of international gateways and bandwidth... [more]
Think Africa Press

Adrian Craddock is a freelance journalist based in London. He has produced work for the BBC World Service, The Weekend West Australian, and Crikey.com.au. His interests include youth affairs and media practices.

Which county has the world’s fastest Internet service? How about South Korea. That’s according to a new study from content delivery service Pando Networks that sampled some 35 petabytes of data from 27 million downloads and 224 countries. The service found that South Korea is top in the world in terms of download speed, averaging 17.62 Mbps.

Romania has the second fastest Internet speeds on the planet, clocking in at 15.27 Mbps, and a trio of Eastern European countries round out the top five, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Latvia. The United States musters a very pedestrian 4.93 Mbps — good for 26th in the world — while China, home to the world’s largest Internet population, manages a dismal 1.96 Mbps.

The slowest Internet, according to the study, is in the Congo, with an average of just 13 KBps, a speed that would make even a 1990s dial-up Internet user cringe. Most of the world’s slowest countries on Pando’s list are located in Africa, where broadband access is sparse and mobile is often the most prevalent point of access for users. However, we suspect that the data from some countries may have suffered from too small a sample size for an accurate reading...

 http://mashable.com/2011/09/21/fastest-download-speeds-infographic/

See also: Global Download Study from ChartsBIN: Link to a world chart which maps speed of different countries

...

• Facebook: users submit around 650,000 comments on the 100 million pieces of content served up every minute on its site.^[1]
• YouTube: every minute, over 35 hours of video are uploaded to the site.^[2]
• eBay is now the world’s largest online marketplace with more than 90 million active users globally and $60 billion in transactions annually, or $2,000 every second.^[3]
• Google: 34,000 searches per second (2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month)^[4]
• Twitter already has 300 million users producing 140 million Tweets a day, which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days^[5] (@ 1,600 Tweets per second)
• Apple: more than 3 billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store by customers in over 77 countries.^[6]
• Yelp: as of March 2011 the site hosted over 17 million user reviews.

• “Humankind shared 65 exabytes of information in 2007, the equivalent of every person in the world sending out the contents of six newspapers every day.”^[7]
• Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, estimate that, in 2008, the world’s 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information.  This is “the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year.” The study also estimated that enterprise server workloads are doubling about every two years, “which means that by 2024 the world’s enterprise servers will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system in the Milky Way Galaxy.”[8]

...

The Technology Liberation Front

From the Comments:

McKinsey report, "Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity," and it has some terrific statistics on data growth. See pg. 6-7:

http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/pu...

The Apple number is out of date. It's more like 10 billion: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/b...

LISTen: The LISNews.org Podcast - Episode #140. "This week's episode is a cross-cutting, interdisciplinary look at the violation of the knowledge ecology perpetrated in Egypt. Practical discussion is presented as to circumventing the disruption of Internet access as well as SMS/MMS messaging as seen there. Implications for information architecture are also discussed".

From Peter Scott's Library blog

"A Research Study Identifies Who Uploads the Majority of the Content to the P2P Piracy Networks"

January 27, 2011 19:52 from Resourceblog

Note: The full fext research paper that's discussed below is available online (Free). You can find a link to it near the bottom of this post.

From a Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Announcement: 

Users who publish contents on BitTorrent dedicate a large part of their own resources (bandwidth, storage capacity) and assume the risks involved in publishing contents that are protected by copyright laws. So, is this altruistic behavior or is there some type of economic incentive at work? "The success of BitTorrent is due to the fact that a few users make a large number of contents available in exchange for receiving economic benefits”, explain the authors of a study carried out by the Telematic Engineering Department of the UC3M, Professors Rubén Cuevas, Carmen Guerrero and Ángel Cuevas. Their analysis demonstrates that a small group of users of these applications (around one hundred) is responsible for 66 percent of the content that is published and 75 percent of the downloads. In other words: the great success of a massively used application like BitTorrent depends on a few users.

The study by the researchers at this public university in Madrid, in collaboration with scientists at the IMDEA Networks Institute, the University of Oregon (USA) and the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany), identifies who these users are and what their incentives for massively publishing contents are. Basically, there are two different profiles. In one group there are the so-called "fake publishers", organizations fighting illegal downloading and malicious users who publish a large quantity of false files in order to protect copyrights and spread infected software, respectively. The other group includes a small number of users (known as "top publishers") who massively publish contents on BitTorrent and make a profit off of this activity, basically from on-line advertising and, to a lesser degree, from VIP subscriptions held by users who wish to speed up the downloading of the contents. "If these users lose interest in this activity or are eliminated from the system, BitTorrent’s traffic will be drastically reduced", the authors of the study predict.

This announcement is based on a research paper presented at the ACM International Conference on emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies - CoNEXT, 2010 at Drexel University (Philadelphia, USA).

Title: Is Content Publishing in BitTorrent Altruistic or Profit-Driven?
Authors: Rubén Cuevas, Carmen Guerrero and Ángel Cuevas, of UC3M, Michal Kryzcka, of the IMDEA Networks Institute, Sebastian Kaune, from the Technical University of de Darmstadt (Germany) and Reza Rejaie, from the University of Oregon (EEUU).

Note: We're Linking to Version II of the paper. It was uploaded to arXiv.org on July 22, 2010.

(via arXiv.org  and MS Academic Search)

Just Released: Statistics: Akamai's State of the Internet Q3 2010 January 25, 2011 01:39 Highlights from the Report Internet Penetration In the third quarter of 2010, over 533 million unique IP addresses, from 235 countries/regions, connected to the Akamai network. This represents 6.6% more IP addresses than the second quarter of 2010, and 20% more than the same quarter a year ago. All of the countries in the top 10 saw quarterly growth, with South Korea’s 11% increase the largest amongst that group. Annual growth was strong as well, with seven of the top 10 countries experiencing double digit percentage increases. Notably, China grew by over 30% in the last year, adding approximately 15 million unique IP addresses. Mobile Consumption The average data consumption experienced by mobile providers grew during the third quarter on 101 of the 111 listed providers. Eighty-nine of the mobile providers saw consumption of data downloaded from Akamai increase on a year-over-year basis. In addition, 35 providers doubled the average monthly volume of content downloaded from Akamai year-over-year. 100 Fastest Cities Worldwide In reviewing the top 100 fastest cities around the world based on average connection speeds during the third quarter of 2010, the report reveals the following findings: + Cities in Asia overwhelmingly continued to dominate the top 100 list, once again accounting for three-quarters of the list, with 61 cities in Japan and 13 cities in South Korea and Hong Kong + After several quarters in first place, Masan, South Korea fell to third place globally, bested by South Korean cities Taegu and Taejon + Constanta, Romania ranked as the fastest city in Europe (#48 out of 100) + Only thirteen U.S. cities made the list, with San Jose, CA ranking as the fastest U.S. city (#57 out of 100) Fastest U.S. States The overall average connection speed for the U.S. as a whole in the third quarter of 2010 was 5.0 Mbps. Delaware continued to maintain its standing as the state with the fastest average connection speed. The overall average peak connection speed in the U.S. during the third quarter was 20 Mbps. In looking at high broadband adoption in the U.S. during the third quarter, trending was mostly positive. Quarterly increases in high broadband adoption of 10% or more were seen in 23 states and the District of Columbia, with New Mexico topping the list at 60% growth. In reviewing year-over-year changes in U.S. broadband adoption, four states (Alaska, Minnesota, Montana, and Alabama) grew more than 100% year-over-year, with Alaska’s massive 191% growth leading the way. Access the Complete Report, Video Overview and Past Reports (Free) Registration is required (also free). See Also: "Two-Thirds of U.S. Internet Users Lack Fast Broadband" (via PC World/Network World) See Also: Opera's State of the Mobile Web Summary ||| Full Text (PDF)  From Resourceblog

 

http://www.ala.org/gwstemplate.cfm?section=greatwebsites&template=/cfapps/gws/default.cfm

Potential employers will be Googling you, so you'd better do so yourself to see what they'll be seeing. If you're horrified by it, here are some ways to improve those results, and make sure there's nothing employer-repellent in the search results in the first place. http://www.productivity501.com/your-online-footprint/8419/

From: Neat New Stuff I Found This Week http://marylaine.com/neatnew.html Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2009.

 

No matter which search engine you use, the quality of your search results depend on how you formulate your search query. A bad search query delivers inadequate search results. And studies show that even the fabled “Google Generation” don’t know how to phrase their searches.

An easy way to learn about the structure of solid, more complex search queries is provided by Google Wonder wheel.

[More] Pandia Search Engine News

It doesn’t feel like 2000 was all that long ago, does it? But on the Internet, a decade is a long time. Ten years ago we were in the era of the dot-com boom (and bust), the Web was strictly 1.0, and Google was just a baby.

Since then people have welled onto the Internet. You don’t actually realize how many more people are on the Internet now until you start comparing numbers. This article is an in-depth study of how the number of Internet users has grown in the past decade...[More]

Some charts from post

Worldwide Internet users, 2000 and 2010

  

 

 

 

Internet users by world region, 2000 and 2010

 

 

From Royal Pingdom blog

IT’S a question that’s bothered cultural critics for decades: while we know more than ever, are we getting dumber as a result of the increasing amount of technology at our disposal?

...

The current debate about intelligence, sparked by Nicholas Carr’s recent and eminently readable “The Shallows”, asks what is the internet doing to our brains? Like Susan Jacoby’s “The Age of American Unreason” and Adam Winer’s “How Dumb Are You?” earlier in the decade, Mr Carr taps into the sense of despair among American intellectuals about the country’s poor educational showing when compared with other countries.

...

What seems to be forgotten in the rush to judgment about the internet making us dumber is that the brain’s basic architecture is created by genetic programs and biochemical interactions that do their job long before a child starts tapping away at a keyboard. “There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organisation in a way that affects one’s ability to focus,” say Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, psychologists at Union College, New York, and the University of Illinois, respectively. 

The danger, if there is one, is that the easy, on-demand access to reams of information from the internet may delude us into mistaking the data we download for genuine wisdom worth acting upon. The internet is just another reference source, albeit one on steroids that sucks up content so fast that little of it ever gets peer reviewed. Only fools would venture into such a forest with anything less than their eyes wide open and their brains fully engaged. Fortunately, there are fewer fools around than some of the scaremongers like to think.

 

From The Economist Babbage blog