MIT Enterprise Technology Review: The Aging Net

Seniornet, one of several nonprofit groups providing Internet and computer training and services for older Americans, found that 4 out of 10 seniors currently have access to a personal computer. Of those, 80 percent accessed the Internet in the past week. The highest growth currently occurs among those just entering the retirement age. Many of them (like my mother whose last job was providing administrative support to a software company) were introduced to computers at work and now use them in their everyday lives.

As the baby boomers retire, we are going to see an even more dramatic rise in the number of seniors online. Today, there are 35 million senior citizens in the United States. By 2020, when most baby boomers have reached retirement age, those numbers will soar to 54 million. How will the graying of the American population impact the Web’s future?

One of the most widely seen usability mistakes that is cutting web sites out of people past age 45 is tiny, unresizable fonts. If you have seniors among your target audience, take a good hard look at your web site and HTML newsletters.

[marketingfix]

The e-mail security firm finds one virus in every 212 e-mails in 2002 (one virus every 3 seconds), a dramatic increase of the one virus per 380 emails last year. [internetnews.com: Top News]

Alexa recently updated the information they provide about web site traffic. Data includes reach per million users, page views per user, as well as reach and page view rank. Here's a detailed explanations of these rankings. You get the ability to chart two sites against each other, though you can't link to a comparison chart (it's the same url as the first web site alone.)

Though Alexa's sample is admittedly biased (their toolbar runs only on Internet Explorer for Windows, and interest in that toolbar is probably uneven across different demographics,) it's still an interesting source to get ballpark figures and trends about your traffic and your competitors'.

Witness the incredibly fast rise of our site from nowhere to, um, not much! In the Amazon.com tradition, there's a movers & shakers list with the top 10 up and down moves. Apparently people don't see why they'd go to CDNow instead of Amazon.com itself.

There's also subdomain information, as seen in the Yahoo and Google profiles.

[marketingfix]

O'Reilly's Google Book is coming soon. It's called Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools by Tara Calishain and should be out in February 2003, but you can pre-order it on Amazon now. (Thanks, Kiruba!)... [Google Weblog]

[Frontier News]