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	07/23/99

Browsing for Factoids

On yet another blazingly hot summer day in Connecticut, I offer up a melange of Internet factoids, statistics, trivia and news. It's time for Short Attention Span Theatre here in the "Network" column space ...

There are now 800 million web pages. OK, that's according to a survey that is nearly two weeks old, so the figure is already outdated ... but it's still a lot of web pages, more than the search engines have been keeping up with. No search engine has managed to sift more than 16 percent of the World Wide Web. Reporters and other professional worriers seemed to think that it is a bad thing that search engines can't keep up ... but I wonder how much that actually matters to most people. Maybe we don't know what we're missing, but I'm not having any real difficulty finding what I think I want ...

It seems impossible, but just five years ago in August, Wired magazine had the brothers Rand and Robyn Miller on the cover for having "given us the first CD-ROM smash hit." The sensation? "Myst," of course. How quickly we forget.

Yet another survey, this one by Arbitron, says that parents are anxious about the Internet content their children are viewing, but many lack the time, understanding, and tools to help their children develop discerning Web skills. Apparently, most kids get their information about the 'Net from other kids, which shouldn't really surprise anyone. I, for example, am not a repository of knowledge for web sites about Pokemon, and my 10-year-old son knows this. My parents didn't know much about the Beatles, either. The web is as much a pop cultural phenomenon as it is anything else, and kids can learn a lot from each other. Though I'd be the first to say that parents should know what their kids are up to on the Internet, or anywhere else, it doesn't seem unusual or dangerous at all to me that kids are teaching each other about the Internet.

The study found that more than half of the children surveyed (54 percent) cited their friends as their first source of intelligence for Web sites, far outnumbering mentions for teachers (6 percent) and parents (5 percent). Among children ages 11-15, nearly two-thirds look to their friends as a resource for Web sites, but even children ages 8-10 mention their peers (25 percent) more often than their parents (9 percent) or teachers (12 percent).

From a 1995 issue of Internet World, which was once my favorite Internet news magazine: "Worst Internet omen: Home Shopping Channel joins the Internet." Internet World died in about 1998, and has since been reincarnated as a journal of electronic commerce and business Internet news. Probably, they saw that coming, too.

1995 is a fascinating year in Internet history, all around, and it's fun to go through back issues of Wired and Internet World online to see what people thought was coming. A little company in Mountain View, Calif., launched the Personal Edition of Netscape Navigator; Windows 95 came out in August; and, under the heading of "Ideas that Never Quite Took Off," USAToday started offering an online version of its newspaper -- at $14.95 a month. The plan to charge a comparable fee to what the paper cost at the newstand lasted only a few months.

One of the more interesting ideas I've heard in a while: Compaq has been awarded a patent for technology that would use keystrokes to recharge batteries in portable computers. Compaq has had its troubles lately, but this seems kind of, well, cool. I wonder if I can type fast enough to actually make the thing work, though.

Finally, from the Department of "You are Not Alone:" The latest guesstimates of how many people are online, worldwide, are available from Nua. It looks like there are now more than 100 million North Americans online, out of a worldwide total of about 179 million. Of course, it all depends on how you count them. But I was disconcerted recently when I realized that I no longer have any close friends or family members who are NOT on the Internet.
How about you?
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