Very interesting statistics were published on the World Internet Usage Statistics and Population. From this table it shows that only 15%! of the world uses the internet which is surprisingly low. When you consider Asia alone has over 50% of world’s population it starts to make more sense given their low adoption rate. This combined with Africa which has an expected low adoption rate of less than 3% really lowers the world average.

Taken from Read/Write Web -Worldwide Internet Penetration is just 15%

From a business perspective I can see a lot of business plans referencing to the strong growth in Asia and companies expanding their services and language versions to accommodate these countries. There appears to be an opportunity to focus on this market with a long term view to grab the huge population yet to embrace the internet the way we have in the west. Surely the likes of China and India will eventually have internet adoption closer to 50% of the population. Japan for example has a very good internet adoption to match the US and some countries in Europe.

I didn’t spot any exact figures for Ireland but maybe someone can point me to another resource so we can compare and contrast with the rest of the world. From a personal point of view I wonder how closely those percentage adoption rates correlate with business internet adoption rates in those countries.

I’m always on the look out for a good stats program for my websites. Since most of the sites I’ve developed use PHP I find bbclone a great little stats add on.
Graphical View

Detailed Visitor View

I’ve a few problems with it, like you can’t compare different months but everything else is really nice, its also free. I’m not a fan of any of the Apache log stats tools such as awstats . Besides the fact that they look ugly they aren’t an accurate representation. They count file loads instead of page loads. So even though you load a CSS file when you view a website this represents a ‘hit’, anyhow that’s another days work and there are ways around this.

So, when I heard Google were allowing you to use Urchins web stats tool for free I thought brilliant at last a product that will give me accurate visitor information. So I added the little tracker code to my websites and check back the next day. But unfortunately no stats had been recorded. I’ve had it running now for 2 weeks and it seems to be having loads of problems recording page hits. Hopefully its just a temporary situation but from what I can tell the stats is a few days behind. If this is going to be the case going forward it is pretty disappointing. The nature of computing and the internet is instant data so this is what you’d expected.

I did a comparison of results last week between bbclone and Google analytics and it is definitely missing stats for a few days.

There is no doubting if the software was recording the information accurately and showing the results instantly that it would be a excellent product, but at the moment its just provoking us.

So here’s hoping it gets sorted in the coming weeks as it has some excellent features.