JJNN 2 May 23rd, 2008

Today's news story is about Japan's internet usage. The original story is given here: http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20080523-00000090-zdn_n-sci.

So it seems there is a company in Japan called Net Ratings and their job is to collect a lot of data about how Japanese people use the internet. This data can than be used to decide marketing strategies and other such things on the internet.

This company has been gathering data about usage since 2001 (ahh...the days of dial up) and they have been seeing a constant increase in both the average number of pages visited by home computers and the average amount of time spent visiting a particular page. But, as you can tell by the picture below, this upward rate did not last for the number of page views:
What is interesting about this is that in one year the amount of time that everyone looks at the internet from their home has gone up by 18% but the number of pages that everyone looks at went down by 3%. The data says that the average person uses the internet just over 20 hours a month and looks at every page they surf to an average of 41 seconds each. This is way up from the 2001 average of 34 seconds each.

The company that is doing at this work is now planning on expanding their services (can you call what they do a service?) to internet usage at work (best stop looking at porn people!) and use of things like instant messenger and programs that use the internet without actually opening a browser. On top of all that, next year they will be looking into how much people use the internet on their cell phones.

I have a couple of questions about this. First and foremost, do we really need to know this? I mean it is an interesting tidbit, but it doesn't really help anyone outside of marketing. In fact, I think it will make already paranoid people more paranoid. They will start to think that Big Brother (yes, with capital letters) is really out there. And second, does anyone know how they can differentiate if a person is looking at a web page using an office computer or a home computer? If anyone knows how they do this let me know. What do people think of these stats and how they can be used? Let me know.

See you all again tomorrow