Online usage on the rise

An interesting report from Media audit about internet usage on the other side of the Atlantic.

in the past three years, the average U.S. adult has nearly doubled their daily use of the Internet as the average U.S. adult spent 2.1 hours per day online in 2006, compared to 3.8 hours in 2008, an 81% increase over three years. As a result, the Internet now represents 32.5% of the typical "media day" for all U.S. adults when compared to daily exposure to newspaper, radio, TV and outdoor advertising.

reports Media Post

Higher speeds needed as internet use changes

Changing uses for the internet by the younger generation will see further pressure to increase net connection speeds.

According to Mike Roberts of Informa Telecoms and Media, (via the Economist)there have been two developments that have contributed to these changes.

1.Apple's I phone and

2.the surprising popularity of plug-in cellular modems for laptops and the like. It appears that many people prefer to pay for seamless internet access rather than use the free public Wi-Fi services in coffee shops and libraries, which come with the hassle of having to log on.

The consequence being that

Such convenience-seeking subscribers have boosted the profits of mobile-phone companies.

A note of warning on the perils of our multi media downloading society

According to the Mail,a women found herself landed with a bill for £4900 after downloading a copy of the Apprentice and two other programmes whilst on holiday.

The incident happened when the women known only as Janet accessed the BBC's I player whilst on a long weekend in the South Of France.

She used her Vodophone connection which abroad charges £4.25 per megabyte.

As they say on the show,You're fired

Oops my ship has just sent the world into financial meltdown

Just imagine the chaos that it would have caused here or in the States?

The severing of an underwater cable somewhere under the Mediterranian led to the loss of internet connections in much of the Middle East,South Asia and Australasia.

What suprised me was how fickle these lionks actually area.One underwater cable severed by a ship that was attempting to moor off the caost of Alexandria plunged bloggers financial institutions and all into complete meltdown.Many countries lost up to 70% of their capacity.

The Guardian reporting that

People just don't realise that all these things go through undersea cables - that this is the main way these economies are all linked," said Alan Mauldin, the research director of TeleGeography. "Even when you're using wireless internet, it's only really wireless back to your base station: the rest is done over real, physical connections

Is it not time for the internet providers to set up better and more secure systems

Guardian top when it comes to RSS feeds

Martin Belam has published the list of the top 100 british newspaper RSS feeds.

He says that http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2007/11/top_100_british_newspaper_feeds_in_google_reader.php

in the absence of any kind of audited figures from the papers themselves, it is one of the few public indications of the relative audiences for RSS feeds.

The results perhaps were not unsurprisng with the Guardian getting almost twice as many feeds as its nearest rival the FT.

Good news also for the likes of Charlie Brooker who by far outweights the others in traffic although as Martin points out

I think that tends to suggest something about the kind of audience that use RSS feeds.

The question that has to be posed of course is whether this is a reliable guide to internet traffic or whether it is simply a small sample of a compartmentalised audience.