The net - bigger, faster, better

It’s redefined mediated human interaction in the 21st century and now we can hardly remember what life was like without the web…but the internet has by no means reached its full potential.

At their last estimate in June 2005, Internet World Stats put the current figure of internet users at 938 million. This is up from 817 million in December 2004, but still only represents about 14.6% of the world’s population.

Despite so much recent literature about problems of the digital divide - the dropping prices of hardware for accessing the internet (such as computers, PDA’s, mobile phones) and the improved access streams (like competitively costed broadband) means that the total number of users on the World Wide Web is still increasing.

English is still the dominant language of most content on the internet at 32.8%. However serious global e-business contenders may soon have to brush up on their Asian language skills with 12.8% of all internet content in Chinese, and 7.6% in Japanese.