Flickr – Technology Liberation Front

Stats, Stats, & More Stats (@ the Net & Online Media)

Adam Thierer — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:38:02 +0000

Very cool little video here by Jess3 documenting Internet growth and activity. Ironically, Berin sent it to me as Adam Marcus and I were updating the lengthy list of Net & online media stats you’ll find down below. Many of the stats we were compiling are shown in the video. Enjoy!

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9641036&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1

1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of Sept 2009; an 18% increase from the previous year.^{^[1]}
81.8 million .COM domain names at the end of 2009; 12.3 million .NET names & 7.8 million .ORG names.^{^[2]}
234 million websites as of Dec 2009; 47 million were added in 2009.^{^[3]} In 2006, Internet users in the United States viewed an average of 120.5 Web pages each day.^{^[4]}
There are roughly 26 million blogs on the Internet^{^[5]} and even back in 2007, there were over 1.5 million new blog posts every day (17 posts per second).^{^[6]}
In December 2009, 86% of the total U.S. online population viewed video content.^{^[7]} The average online viewer watched 187 videos (up 95 percent from the previous year), while the average video length viewed grew from 3.2 to 4.1 minutes.^{^[8]} The majority of online video viewing (52%) occurred at video sites ranked outside of the top 25, suggesting the increased fragmentation of online video and the emergence of sites in the “long tail.”^{^[9]}
YouTube reports that 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute,^{^[10]} and 1 billion videos are served up daily by YouTube, or 12.2 billion videos viewed per month.^{^[11]}
For video hosting site Hulu, as of Nov 2009, 924 million videos were viewed per month in the U.S.^{^[12]}
Developers have created over 140,000 apps for the Apple iPhone and iPod and iPad and made them available in the Apple App Store.^{^[13]} Customers in 77 countries can choose apps in 20 categories, and users have downloaded over three billion apps since its inception in July 2008.^{^[14]} Apple’s iTunes Store has a catalog of 12 million songs, over 55,000 TV episodes, and 8,500 movies. It has sold more than 10 billion songs.^{^[15]}
Social networking giant Facebook reports that each month, its 400+ million users upload more than 3 billion photos, and create over 3.5 million events. More than 3 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each week. There are also more than 3 million active Pages on the site.^{^[16]}
There are 10 million edits made to Wikipedia every seven weeks.^{^[17]}
Twitter users send out 50 million tweets per day, an average of 600 tweets per second.^{^[18]}
4 billion photos hosted by Flickr as of Oct 2009.^{^[19]}

[1] Royal Pingdom, Internet 2009 in Numbers, Jan. 22, 2010, http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/01/22/internet-2009-in-numbers.

[2] Id.

[3] Id.

[4] Gavin O’Malley, Comcast Taps Hispanic Web Portal, MediaPost News, Online Media Daily, March 8, 2006, www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=40714

[5] Royal Pingdom, supra.

[6] David Sifry, The State of the Live Web, April 2007, www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000493.html

[7] comScore, The 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review – A Recap of the Year in Digital Marketing 10, Feb. 2010, http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/2/comScore_Releases_2009_U.S._Digital_Year_in_Review.

[8] Id.

[9] Id. at 12.

[10] Ryan Junee, Zoinks! 20 Hours of Video Uploaded Every Minute!, Broadcasting Ourselves: The Official YouTube Blog, May 20, 2009, http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/05/zoinks-20-hours-of-video-uploaded-every_20.html

[11] Royal Pingdom, supra.

[12] Royal Pingdom, supra.

[13] Apple, 140,000 apps at your fingertips. From day one., www.apple.com/ipad/app-store.

[14] Press Release, Apple, Apple’s App Store Downloads Top Three Billion (Jan. 5, 2010), www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/05appstore.html

[15] Press Release, Apple, iTunes Store Tops 10 Billion Songs Sold (Feb. 25, 2010), www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25itunes.html.

[16] Facebook, Statistics, www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics (last accessed Mar. 2, 2010).

[17] Katalaveno, Edit growth measured in time between every 10,000,000^th edit, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Katalaveno/TBE (last accessed Mar. 2, 2010).

[18] Twitter Blog, Measuring Tweets, Feb. 22, 2010, http://blog.twitter.com/2010/02/measuring-tweets.html.

[19] Royal Pingdom, supra.

Some Amazing Numbers Re: Growth of Net & Social Media

Adam Thierer — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:36:59 +0000

Most of you have probably already seen this but Pingdom recently aggregated and posted some amazing stats about “Internet 2009 In Numbers.” Worth checking them all out, but here are some highlights:

1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of Sept 2009; 18% increase in Internet users since previous year.
81.8 million .COM domain names at the end of 2009; 12.3 million .NET & 7.8 million .ORG
234 million websites as of Dec 2009; 47 million were added in 2009.
90 trillion emails sent on the Internet in 2009; 1.4 billion email users worldwide.
26 million blogs on the Internet.
27.3 million tweets on Twitter per day as of Nov 2009.
350 million people on Facebook; 50% of them log in every day; + 500,000 active Facebook applications.
4 billion photos hosted by Flickr as of Oct 2009; 2.5 billion photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
1 billion videos served by YouTube each day; 12.2 billion videos viewed per month; 924 million videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US as of Nov 2009; + the average Internet user in the US watches 182 online videos each month.

And yet some people claim that digital generativity and online innovation are dead! Things have never been better.

How Did We Live Without These Technologies 10 Years Ago!

Adam Thierer — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:43:50 +0000

Over at Silicon Alley Insider, Gregory Galant has a wonderful post about “18 Awesome Tech Things We Didn’t Have 10 Years Ago.” It serves as another great example of the amazing technological progress we have witnessed over the past decade. He’s asking people for suggestions for what else should be on the list, so head over there and let him know. Seems like wi-fi technologies should be on there somehow. FiOS deserves a shout-out, too. And where’s Firefox & Chrome? Also, I’ll put in a special word for some amazing new home theater technologies: high-def flat-screens and projectors; media servers & Windows Media Center; BluRay; and 3 incredible gaming / media consoles (Wii, PS3, & XBox). Anyway, here’s Galant’s list:

Wikipedia Gmail Facebook YouTube Twitter AdWords Amazon AWS RSS (started in ‘99 but didn’t catch on till the ’00s) Meetup iPod Google Maps Podcasts Mint Skype/VOIP iPhone Google Docs Creative Commons Flickr

COPPA 2.0: The New Battle over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech

Berin Szoka — Sun, 24 May 2009 21:49:52 +0000

Adam Thierer & I have just released a detailed examination (PDF) of brewing efforts to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 to cover adolescents and potentially all social networking sites—an approach we call “COPPA 2.0.”

As Adam explained on Larry Magid’s CNET podcast, COPPA mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, most importantly that websites obtain the “verifiable consent” of a child’s parent before collecting personal information about that child or giving that child access to interactive functionality that might allow the child to share their personal information with others. The law was intended primarily to “enhance parental involvement in a child’s online activities” as a means of protecting the online privacy and safety of children.

Yet advocates of expanding COPPA—or “COPPA 2.0″—see COPPA’s verifiable parental consent framework as a means for imposing broad regulatory mandates in the name of online child safety and concerns about social networking, cyber-harassment, etc. Two COPPA 2.0 bills are currently pending in New Jersey and Illinois. The accelerated review of COPPA to be conducted by the FTC next year (five years ahead of schedule) is likely to bring to Washington serious talk of expanding COPPA—even though Congress clearly rejected covering adolescents age 13-16 when COPPA was first proposed back in 1998.

We’ll discuss some of the key points of our paper in a series of blog posts, but here are the top nine reasons for rejecting COPPA 2.0, in that such an approach would:

Burden the free speech rights of adults by imposing age verification mandates on many sites used by adults, thus restricting anonymous speech and essentially converging—in terms of practical consequences—with the unconstitutional Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA), another 1998 law sometimes confused with COPPA;
Burden the free speech rights of adolescents to speak freely on—or gather information from—legal and socially beneficial websites;
Hamper routine and socially beneficial communication between adolescents and adults;
Reduce, rather than enhance, the privacy of adolescents, parents and other adults because of the massive volume of personal information that would have to be collected about users for authentication purposes (likely including credit card data);

Would likely be the subject of massive fraud or evasion since it is not always possible to definitively verify the parent-child relationship, or because the system could be “gamed” in other ways by determined adolescents;
Do nothing to prevent offshore sites and services from operating outside these rules;
Present major practical challenges for law enforcement officials in the face of such evasion by both domestic users and offshore sites;
Could destroy opportunities for new or smaller website operators to break into the market and offer competing services and innovations, thus contributing to consolidation of online content and services by erecting barriers to entry; and
Violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, since Internet activity clearly represents interstate commerce that states have no authority to regulate.

http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=15686870&access_key=key-1cbfqkwyx8t9rzdjgr8m&page=1&version=1&viewMode=list

A Wide Diversity of Consumer Attitudes about Online Privacy

Berin Szoka — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:03:30 +0000

Debates about online privacy often seem to assume relatively homogeneous privacy preferences among Internet users. But the reality is that users vary widely, with many people demonstrating that they just don’t care who sees what they do, post or say online. Attitudes vary from application to application, of course, but that’s precisely the point: While many reflexively talk about the “importance of privacy” as if a monolith of users held a single opinion, no clear consensus exists for all users, all applications and all situations.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this picture makes the point brilliantly—showing:

locations where [Flickr] users are more likely to post their photos as “public,” which is the default setting, in green. Places where Flickr users are more likely to put privacy controls on their photos show up in red.

Of course, geography is just one dimension across which users may vary in their attitudes about privacy, but the map makes the basic point about variation very well. Seeing what users actually do in real life says a lot more about their preferences than merely polling them about what they think they care about in the abstract—as my colleagues Solveig Singleton and Jim Harper argued brilliantly in their 2001 paper With A Grain of Salt: What Consumer Privacy Surveys Don’t Tell Us (SSRN).

Googlephobia: Part 5 – Google at Ten & Its Competition

Berin Szoka — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:30:51 +0000

By Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer

As we noted in our intro to this ongoing series, Google’s tenth anniversary has passed with Googlephobia reaching new heights of hysteria.

But is Google really too big and dangerous, or are people just too lazy to find other alternatives to each of the wonderful services that Google offers? If one is truly paranoid about the firm’s supposed dominance, it doesn’t take much effort to live a Google-free life. To prove it, we set out to find alternatives to each of the services that Google provides. After awhile, we got a little tired of compiling alternatives in each category and just provided links for the additional choices at your disposal. It’s tough to see what the fuss is about with the cornucopia of choices at our disposal. If you don’t like Google, then just don’t use it or any of its services. The choice is yours.

In each case, we’ve listed Google first, even though Google may not be the market leader ( e.g., Google’s relatively unknown social network Orkut).

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