Checked Your E-mail Today?
OK, silly question?
How many times have you checked your e-mail today?
What mode of communication, commerce and information that ranks among the most powerful and vital tools the world has ever known is younger than at least a third of the planet’s estimated 6.7 billion people?
It probably took you less time to guess the answer – the Internet – than it took for this page to paint on your monitor, but did you hesitate for just a moment because of the age part of the question? Perhaps you suspected it was a trick question. It does seem a little improbable that the Internet has been around for so little time.
It’s true. The World Wide Web wasn’t even invented until 1989 and wide public interest wasn’t sparked until the emergence of Mosaic 2.0, the Web browser that supported graphics embedded in its pages. The real explosion in the number of Internet users didn’t hit until the years 1995 and 1996, and it hasn’t stopped since.
So, how did we ever get along without the Internet? Consider these statistics gathered by Internet Stats Worldwide in June 2008:
- Nearly 1.5 billion of the world’s people log onto the Net.
- The country with the largest number of users is China, at 253 million. China’s population is estimated at a little over 1.3 billion, which means about 19% of its people are connected.
- The United States follows China with 220 million users, but that’s an impressive 72.5% of its 303.8 million people.
- Officially, the highest percentage of any nation’s people tracked using the Internet is Greenland, where 92.3% are online. That’s out of a population, however, of just 56,326. Maybe the most remarkable usage stat of all comes from the Netherlands, where a little over 90% percent of that nation’s 16.6 million people are online.
- An estimated 25 billion e-mails are dispatched daily around the world. (Of course, as e-mail users know, that number includes a lot of spam.)
|
Here’s another statistic to note about the Internet:
- A recent Google search for the word, HeartMath, estimated – in 0.22 seconds – the number of hits across the Internet at about 171,000 and it’s growing. Log on at www.heartmath.org.
|
|
