… is the headline result from a collection of seemingly random Internet-related factoids from a Guardian report of a UK poll.

Among those with a web connection at home, 31% [of 14 to 21 year olds] said that they had launched their own personal site or blog. Those aged 16 to 17 have taken most avidly to personal online publishing, with a female bias.

I hope the full results get published somewhere.

Might be interesting for others at AoIR6.

The American consumer advocacy group Consumer Reports recently published a online hazards survey which found:

• 33% of those surveyed said a virus or spyware caused serious problems with their computer systems and/or financial losses within the past two years.
• 50% reported a spyware infection in the past six months. Of those, 18% said the infection was so bad they had to erase their hard drives.

  To avoid spyware, 51% of all online users reported being more careful visiting Web sites, and 38 % said they download free programs less frequently.

• 64% of survey respondents said they had detected viruses on their computer in the past two years. 4% found them at least 50 times.
• Macs are safer than Windows PCs for some online hazards. Only 20% of Mac owners surveyed reported detecting a virus in the past two years, compared with 66% of Windows PC owners. Just 8% of Mac users reported a spyware infection in the last six months vs. 54% of Windows PC users.

To this I would add that my guess is that a fair amount of the virus reporting by Mac owners is probably "false positives" - people whose Macs stopped working for some unrelated reason and they blamed it on viruses. Ditto for spyware. I don’t think viruses or spyware aimed at current Macs are still around outside of the labs of anti-virus software companies.

There are some good recommendations linked alongside the report but interestingly it fails to mention one of the best ways to reduce the incidence of viruses and spyware - don’t use Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer. It’s not that they are bad in themselves (though I would argue the free alternatives like Eudora and Firefox are better) - it’s that virus and spyware writers tailor their programs to work with the most popular email and web browsing programs out there.

A note about computer literacy - 17% of respondents weren?t using antivirus software and 10% of those with high-speed broadband access–prime targets for hackers–said they didn?t have firewall protection.

Also see two recent reports from the excellent Pew Internet and American Life project:
Spam & Phishing (April)
Spyware (July)

The UK government is trying out a new service - the People’s Network Enquiry Service where you can ask (it seems) just about any question you like and a librarian either from the UK or somewhere else in the world (if you mail outside 9-5 Mon to Fri) will try to answer it. Will this encourage those not online to use it by providing an easy to understand alternative to surfing? Time will tell…

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At a recent presentation, the OII unveiled some data from its 2005 survey of UK Internet use (and put it in an international perspective). That data is on their site now. I found the slide below particularly interesting:

The choice to ‘go broadband’ in the UK doesn’t seem as income-constrained as I thought. Of course that is the percentage of UK Internet users with broadband so if you adjust for the fact that low earners are less likely to be online at all, it looks more stratified. But you can check out the presentation yourself…

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The Institute for Public Policy Research (leading UK think-tank) has launched a 3-week consultation (on their blog) concerning Britain digital future.

Today we launch the first of three week-long online consultations, as a way of gathering opinion, ideas and recommendations for our Digital Manifesto. We will post questions under the following themes, over the following weeks:

• 7th-13th April: Innovating
• 14th-20th April: Reassuring
• 21st-27th April: Empowering

In each instance, we invite replies to our specific questions (added to this blog) from all sorts of perspectives, and all types of expertise. With authors’ permission, we would like to be able to use or quote these ideas in our final publication, and credit them accordingly.

I reckon that media and new media scholars should make their voice heard about their preferred direction of new media development in Britain (and elsewhere)? Top of my head: open source, in-house capacity, surveillance, digital inequality, etc, etc, and unfortunately etc. again.

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According to the 2005 International Business Owners Survey, reported in The Economist, there were wide variations in the amount of time spent by business owners on email. Interestingly, this time does not correlate particularly closely with domestic Internet penetration - it is highest in the Philippines.

It is also striking that the percentage of those who think the Internet has increased their revenues ranges from 13% in France to 84% in (again) the Philippines (graph follows below).
(more…)

As David Wilcox points out, there is a new site/service recently launched - the Digital Divide Network which offers an array of communication tools to practitioners from blogs to good old fashioned discussion boards as well as collections of articles.

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Did you know there are more Korean bloggers than American ones? That 90% of South Koreans in their 20s have a blog?! UsageWatch.org cites the makers of Cyworld and some market research to suggest that one in four of all South Koreans have a blog on that service alone. Makes the November figures for the US (7% of adult US internet users or 2.7% of the US population according to Pew) seem puny by comparison.

I will be studying UK weblogging for my thesis but this really makes me wish I spoke Korean and could do my research there… Also see:

• this International Herald Tribune article for the demographic and financial figures
• ‘I Was a Cyholic, a Cyworld Addict’ for a more personal view (from one of the ‘citizen reporters’ for OhMyNews - another S Korean phenomenon I blogged about earlier…
• and here for some suggestions about why S Korea has such high broadband penetration.
• Update: Blogcount cites sources suggesting even higher numbers of Korean bloggers and points out that the various blog monitoring services like Technorati don’t seem to be tracking them.

Russia Broadband Overview

the residential sector is dominated at present by the informal ‘Home Networks’ which use Ethernet LANs to link up buildings, housing developments and sometimes whole neighbourhoods to ‘broadband’ access (2 Mbps up to the buildings is considered the average by local observers). These operators account for some 75% residential users, or some 550,000 by end 2004, connected households throughout Russia, according to analysts. They are generally very low cost. These informal networks are expected to dominate for perhaps a further two years until DSL is more widespread. During this period the larger telcos are expected to try to buy up the small Home LAN companies and cooperatives.

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If you believe as I do that broadband Internet access is qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from dialup access (see this Pew report and this ethnographic report in the UK from iSociety for some examples) then this recent global suvey of broadband access gives pause for thought.

Of the 128m broadband users worldwide, 53m are Asian, 42m are in the Americas and 32.8m are in Europe. While user growth in Asia is a little slower than elsewhere it is still well ahead in overall numbers and it will be interesting to see what difference this makes to the domestication of Internet in those countries and perhaps to their power in Internet governance debates. Sadly Africa seems as ‘digitally divided’ as ever, no matter how you look at it. The report lumps the Middle East and Africa together with ‘nearly 1m’ subscribers. And I’d be prepared to bet most of them are either white South Africans or wealthy Arabs and Israelis.

As to Europe, to my surprise, France (which has historically lagged behind in overall Internet penetration - see ITU) has the largest number of broadband subscribers in Europe - 5.27m (though Germany has 5.26m and the UK has 5m). Broadband prices in Europe have apparently dropped by 23% since the beginning of 2004. I hope this year brings continuing falls to the point where it no longer makes financial sense for Internet users to stick to dial-up…