Tag: statistics

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Saturday Reading, 1 March 2008

Summer’s over, so time to burrow indoors and catch up on reading, yeah? Here’s a few things to kick off your weekend.

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Australian business broadband penetration

While poking around the stats as part of my scrag-fight with Laurel Papworth, I found these figures for how many Australian businesses are using broadband.

% of internet-connected businesses with broadband

2003-04 41.5 %
2004-05 62.7 %
2005-06 82.5 %

Mind you…

Broadband… is defined by the ABS as an ‘always on’ Internet connection with an access speed equal to or greater than 256kbps.

Nothing to be proud of.

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Web 2.0? “Hey, wait for us!”

Photograph of Bell Aviation Rocket Pack, 1964

Statistics on how businesses use the Internet demonstrate how the Web 2.0 digerati are rocketing so far ahead of reality into their self-obsessed digital fantasy-land that they might as well be on Mars.

ABS figures show that fewer than a third of Australian businesses have a “web presence”.

This week the redoubtable Laurel Papworth complained about that:

Well, that sucks… Not much hope for Web 2.0 if 70% of us can’t get our heads around Web 1.0, is there?

Stephen Collins, who I’ve read for a while and chatted with recently, agrees.

I am disappointed. It indicates just how far behind the 8-ball most business in Australia is…

Laurel associates this lack of penetration with the widespread lack of understanding of the power of the Web, and specifically Web 2.0 technologies, amongst Australian business. I’d have to say I agree.

Really? Disappointed? I see steady growth in those “web presence” figures. I’ll show you in a moment. First, though, I need to tell you why I reckon you’re wrong.

“Disappointment” shows a misunderstanding of what constitutes “business”, even in the 21st Century. And there’s still a lot of work to help businesses lay the digital foundations before we start building so many crystal castles.

Continue reading “Web 2.0? “Hey, wait for us!””

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The world’s population explosion

Graph showing dates when the world population reached 1 billion, 2 billion etc

Yeah I just said that it’s the wrong sort of day for numerical analysis. However I stumbled across these numbers and had to draw a graph immediately.

The world’s population reached 1 billion people in 1804. The second billion was added by 1927. And so it goes. In 1999 we hit 6 billion, and current estimates are that we’ll hit 7 billion in 2013.

You all know the drill from here…

A small proportion (us Australians, Americans, Europeans, Japanese and some others) chew up the vast majority of the world’s resources and are dumping our shit everywhere. We know we need to stop. But those other billions reckon they’ve had the rough end of the pineapple for too long and now it’s their turn.

And we’re surprised when they get stroppy about it.