Finding Info by Googling

Google is the number one search engine in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. Google now provides an interface for 120 languages and offers results in 35 languages. Remarkably, more than 50% of Google traffic is from outside the U.S.

So... how easily can you be found, on Google.com?

Internet Protocol Overload!

BusinessWeek reports that the Internet is running out of addresses. There are 4 billion possible
combinations that make up a 10-digit IP (Internet Protocol) address, which identifies the location of computers, routers, and other network devices. Some 3 billion IP addresses are taken, and the remainder will likely be gone by 2010.

Bogus Information for the Masses

For at least the last three years, 3 to 4 four times a day, I've received various ridiculous "help me move my fortune from my third-world country" email letters. How can the same transparent tactics be employed more than 3,000 times unless there are legions of moron recipients who actually respond to such letters?

Yet, how difficult can it be for full-facultied recipients to figure out that these bogus claims are perpetrated by career criminals in the world's cyber cafes where their thievery is largely untraceable? Did I miss an important announcement -- is the general level of intelligence dropping to new lows

Clean My Mailbox

Check out www.cleanmymailbox.com/whitelist.html which offers a "free tool to generate specific instructions on how to whitelist your publication(s) within a variety of popular fitering solutions in use today."

By filling in and submitting a form they supply, and you'll be presented with the custom HTML code to use in developing your own customized Whitelisting Instructions web page.

Privacy Related Sites

Here are some privacy related websites:

www.privacyrights.org

www.healthprivacy.org

www.junkbusters.com

PC Wins Out over Spouse

Demetria Gallegos, writing in the Denver Post Staff, says that a new study indicates that most people spend more time with technology than they do with their family. A survey conducted by Kelton Research, and commissioned by http://www.support.com/, a site that offers tech support found that 65% of respondents spent more time with a computer than with their spouse or significant other.

More than 80 percent of those polled said they were more dependent on their computer than they were three years ago. The survey was conducted in December and January, involving 1001 participants nationwide.

Small Transgressions Exposed

Jennifer Saranow, writing in the Wall Street Journal, discusses how “bad parking, loud talking -- no transgression is too trivial to document online.” In some respects this can be socially beneficial, but too quickly, I fear, such postings represent the kind of over-information in which too many people are immersed.

The Web as Social Hangout

From the AP newswire in New York:

“The online hangout MySpace got even more popular in November, beating Yahoo in Web traffic for the first time, a research company said Tuesday. News Corp.'s MySpace recorded 38.7 billion U.S. page views last month, compared with 38.1 billion for Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix. MySpace's growth was 2 percent over October and triple the 12.5 billion recorded in November 2005.”

“The numbers underscore the rapid rise of a social-networking site that encourages visitors to stay and make friends through free tools for messaging, sharing photos and creating personal pages known as profiles.”

Getting Our Information Faster

According to J.D. Power and Associates in their “2006 Internet Service Provider Residential Customer Satisfaction Study,” broadband has finally passed dial-up for Internet home access. Some 56% of residential ISP customers subscribe to broadband, and 44% to subscribe dial-up.

Search Engines Aid in Purchases

Where do web surfers get information on potential purchases? According to Hitwise.com, an online competitive intelligence service, Google is by far the top U.S. search engine in terms of driving visitors to shopping sites, accounting for 14.9% of visits. Yahoo! Search was found to be the second most popular search engine, accounting for 4.7% of shopper visits, followed by MSN Search and a rapidly-gaining MySpace.

Junk Mail May Never Die

Louise Story, writing in the New York Times, sheds light on why in the age of the Internet and email, junk mail is proliferating:

“United States Postal Service says marketers sent more than 114 billion pieces of direct mail, increase of about 15 percent from five years ago; volume of bulk mail, which is all direct mail, exceeded first class in last year; advertisers like it that mail ads, which do not get snagged in spam filters, can be aimed at just right customers and be monitored for effectiveness; those traits are increasingly important to companies as they target American public into finer and finer categories; some advertising executives comments.”

A Nation of Internet Addicts?

The U.S. could be rife with Internet addicts as clinically ill as alcoholics, an unprecedented study suggested. Based on a telephone survey, researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine concluded that more than one of every eight U.S. residents showed at least one sign of "problematic Internet use." The findings of this survey was consistent with those of previous, less rigorous studies.

The typical Internet addict appears to be a single, college-educated, white male in his 30s, who spends about 30 hours per week on non-essential computer use. Some people hide their Internet surfing, or go online to cure foul moods in ways that mirrored alcoholics using booze, using the Internet to “self-medicate."