surveys || netizens || top ten

Demographics

	who's wired now?
	who will be wired soon?
	who will be wired eventually?
	of those who are wired, what do we know about them?

Surveys

Nua

This group from Ireland keeps track of hundreds of surveys worldwide. They also make inferences and draw conclusions. They don't have all the answers, but they have some great questions. I subscribe to Nua's weekly newsletter in which Gerry McGovern takes an often provocative stand in 250 words. I highly recommend this site. It's the best at what it does -- making free information pay.

Georgia Tech's Surveys

Twice a year, the folks at Georgia Tech survey the Internet. They look only at big issues, such as gender and browser type. They've been doing it for four years, so the trends are getting interesting to note.

CyberAtlas: the Reference Desk for Web Marketing

These folks cull their data elsewhere, including Nua and Georgia Tech. The focus on commercial marketing makes it most useful.

Emerging Technologies Research Group

[ more to come ]

Network Wizards Internet Domain Survey

These folks have been counting the size of the Internet for almost twenty years. The numbers corroborate other trends and neatly fit the roller-coaster curve of Moore's law. Other sources of similar info:

	European Hosts
	Matrix Information and Directory Services
	MIT's Stats on Web Growth
	General Magic's Internet Trends
	The Netcraft Web Server Survey

Project 2000

Project 2000, directed by professors Donna Hoffman and Tom Novak, was founded in 1994 at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, to study the marketing implications of commercializing the World Wide Web. In the years since, this pioneering scholarly effort has emerged as one of the premiere research centers in the world for the study of Electronic Commerce. However, that's not saying much because there's not much competition yet.

Internic

Among Internic's Registration Services is Whois. You can type in a url such as medaille.edu or an IP address such as 207.224.116.5 and find out what person or organization officially registered it. You can often find out who those folks get their internet service from by following the network server (NS1, NS2, etc.) links. This tool is especially useful for establishing credibility, which can have great bearing on your judgement of the validity and reliability of a site's content.

Netizens

The Digital Generation

In answer to the demographic questions above, we're all wired. Oh, a Ted Kaczinski still lives in an unwired shack on purpose. Too many people are too poor to pay the power company. But for all practical purposes, an interconnected network of electric power grids connects every building in this country to every other building. Everyone has a telephone. Everyone has a TV. Everyone has a radio.

That's not true, however, for most of the rest of humanity. They've never used a telephone. They've never owed a TV.

Looking at the Internet, what percentage of Americans has ever used a computer? Has ever sent email? Has ever used a Web browser? The numbers here get smaller and smaller.

Propeller Heads

Then we have the people who spend more waking time on-line than off. I don't mean the 40-hour data entry clerk. I mean the people making the Web pages at Geocities, haunting the chatrooms at Talk City, and reading the e-zines like Nerve. They're the developers who use the wiz-bang tools made by Macromedia. They're the webmasters charged with doing for their site what Scott Kurnit has done at The Mining Company. These people certainly have added terms to English -- digerati, cyberians, net-heads, ram jockeys -- as well as a bewildering array of acronyms from ADSL to .zip.

Three years ago this culture didn't exist, so it hasn't been studied or documented by the press or the sociologists. Let's ask the questions again:

who are they now? who will they be soon? who will they be eventually? what do we know about them? To get a broad ongoing portrait, try Hotwired.

To take a more literate peek, grab your beanie, the one with the propeller, and check out an elegant site sponsored by The The Foundation for Digital Culture:

	to promote and support digital culture and art on-line
	to foster communication and community
	to advance an understanding of digital culture that may serve as a reference for content, policy, organization, and practice

Top 10 Reasons
Software and Hypertext Developers Ignore Users

source
John Gosbee, MD, MS, Executive Director, Center for Applied Medical Informatics
Michigan State University Kalamazoo Center for Medical Studies
1000 Oakland Dr., Kalamazoo, MI 49008
http://omerad1.chm.msu.edu/Users/~omerad/Faculty/Gosbee.html

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