Category Archives: internet

growth, internet

Growing Exponentially

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And no, the question is not “What is my waistline doing?” {*grin*}

Along with all the publicity about running out of IPv4 addresses, how many of you caught on to the near exponential growth of the beast called the internet over the last 30 years? Given that I was assigned my first domain name in the eighties when there were only a few of machines connected, I have seen it happen and lived to tell the tale. Sometimes it has amazed me and other times it has seemed like the most obvious of things.

What do I mean? Consider the following data points:

Year Number of Internet Connected Devices
1984 1000
1992 1 million
2008 1 billion
2010 5 billion
2020 50 billion (est.)

Who would have thought that an academic/DARPA experiment to go beyond dial-up store and forward systems would grown into such a monster. 1985 was the year the very first .com domains were issued (symbolics.com was the very first in 1985). Most companies saw no purpose to registering a domain name back in the good old days. All the hoopla would come later.

So my question for you is how many devices in your home and on your person are connected to the internet right now? I come up with between 10 and 20 for me, depending on how you define device. (And no, my toaster is currently not connected to the internet!)

internet, pew study

It’s Official

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Today there was an article by Mark Hatchman that summarized the latest Pew Research report on the web. It confirmed what I have suspected for a long time: blogs are the domain of old farts and fartettes. OK, OK, Mr Hatchman didn’t refer to old farts and fartettes, nor does the original report, but they may as well have.

The report was a result of the Pew Research Center’s ongoing Internet & American Life Project effort. The key finding relevant to blogging was that the number of teens that said they blogged dropped from 28% in 2006 to 14% in 2009. Contrast that with the constant 10% of adults that say they maintain a blog. The real kiss of death amidst teens is that they consider blogging to be un-cool. 

Other interesting numbers pointed out that teens prefer myspace while adults tend towards facebook. No real surprise there. One glimmer of hope – teens don’t tweet. Less than 8% of teens use Twitter compared to 19% of adults. Twitter was also rated an un-cool amidst teens. 

So looks like the old farts and fartettes have it – we can blog and tweet to our hearts desire – the kids won’t be reading so we can say anything we want about them. {*grin*} 

One factoid that we all are probably already aware of is that there was a decline of roughly 5% in the number of homes with internet/broadband in 2009. Pew made no explanation, but I suspect the economy. For interesting reading, take a look at the full report from Pew Research.