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The global distribution of Internet users has sharply shifted away from the largely American base of years past, giving the "world" in World Wide Web new legitimacy.

Figures from March show that fewer than one-quarter of global Internet users were in the United States, comScore Networks said in a report last week. A decade ago, the rate was about two-thirds.

ComScore, a market researcher based in Chicago, says it believes that its latest research is the first worldwide survey that uses consistent measurements in all major markets, including China and India.

Of the 694 million unique visitors over the age of 14 who used the Internet in March, the most were in seven countries: the United States (152.1 million), China (74.7 million), Japan (52.1 million), Germany (31.8 million), Britain (30.2 million), South Korea (24.7 million) and France (23.9 million), it says.

Together, China, Japan, India and South Korea represent nearly 25 percent of the total worldwide online population, 168.1 million users, a figure that in the aggregate is 11 percent larger than the U.S. online surfership. That is true even though the research excludes traffic from public computers like those at Internet cafés, a primary means of access in Asia, and access from cellphones or PDAs.

Perhaps more revealing than the raw numbers of users by country is comScore's calculation of how much time surfers spend online in each nation. By that ranking, calculated by average hours spent online per visitor, the United States is not even in the top 15.

Israel led the list, with the average user spending 57.5 hours online in March, about two hours a day, or twice as much as the average American. The rest of the top five were Finland, South Korea, the Netherlands and Taiwan, all of them with widespread high-speed Internet access, comScore noted.

The most visited sites (or what comScore calls "the top media properties worldwide") are led by MSN-Microsoft, with 538.6 million global users, followed by Google, with 495.8 million, and Yahoo, with 480.2 million. All three include their non-U.S. sites in the totals.

The only traditionally non-American site in the top 15 was Wanadoo, which is based in France and was No. 15, but the biggest surprise was No. 7, Wikipedia, the user-created Internet encyclopedia, which maintains many foreign-language sites in addition to the main English one.

A lot more people are using instant messaging systems at work. The result? A lot more people are seeing "malicious" IM chats on their screens.

IM "attacks" are growing, while spam and virus volumes are holding steady, according to Postini, which sells corporate e-mail and messaging services.

Of course, it's all relative. Of the 22 billion messages Postini processed in April, unwanted e-mail accounted for 18.5 billion - a staggering 84 percent of the total and about the same as the previous month.

But compared to e-mail viruses, which are 2 percent to 3 percent of all e-mail, malicious IM content is a meager 0.1 percent of IM traffic. Still, that is an increase of 400 percent since March, the company said.

It may sound like the name of a bad monster movie, but the "Giant Magneto-Resistance Effect" led its discoverer, Peter Grünberg, to be honored as one of Europe's inventors of the year last week.

The Giant Magneto-Resistance Effect vastly increases the data volume stored per square inch of hard drive, according to the European Patent Office. Eight winning inventors were chosen on the basis of European Patent Office patents granted from 1991 to 2000.

Grünberg, a professor at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, took the honors in the universities and research category.

Federico Faggin, a native of Italy, was honored with the lifetime achievement award for his contributions to the invention of the microprocessor in 1970 at Intel. His most recent research has been with Foveon, a California company of which he is chief executive, working on image sensors for digital photography.

(www.iht.com)

 

 
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