A study released Wednesday by Harris Interactive shows that (adult) Americans have spent an average of 13 hours per week connected to the Internet.

Made in October 2009, soon after the financial crisis and the presidential election the U.S., the telephone poll of 2029 adults and found that about 24% of them are online for 24 hours a week or more, while only 20% reported using the web for two hours or less per week.

Harris Interactive, which conducts research on the use of the Internet since 1995, noticed a considerable increase in hours spent by Americans on the Internet in recent years. Between 1999 and 2002, users spent about 7 hours a week online, a figure that rose to 8 or 9 hours between 2003 and 2006 and reached 11 hours per week in 2007, according to the Trading Markets site.

The survey also reveals that adults between 20 and 39 years are those that are more hours a week online for about 18 hours, followed by age group from 25 to 29 years, which are connected by 17 hours per week on average.

Besides the time spent on the web, the research also questioned about purchases over the Internet and found that half of respondents had bought something for ecommerce in the last month, including 62% aged 20 to 39 years and 56% between 40 and 49.

According to the website SOA World, the increase in hours per week that American adults are online can have several reasons, since the increase in applications for the Internet, online videos and even ecommerce shopping for financial reasons, since in times of crisis financial online has become a lower cost compared with leaving home.

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Via: TechCrunch.

The Sharein is a service that entered a phase of beta testing in March and promises to be an important ally in time to indicate interesting content to friends, family and clients, adding the key technologies for sharing information.

The operation of the tool is quite simple: through a fast and free registration and you get an account. Simply drag a button to the bookmarks toolbar of the browser or, if Firefox is installed on the machine, download a small supplement.

When you come across an article, video or website and wants to indicate that, just click the icon for the site for a small form is opened. From it, you can send a link to the material via email, or publish in their profiles on social networks Twitter or Facebook.

So far, nothing different from what could be done with the Copy and Paste. But the great thing about Sharein is that when you register, you create an administration panel that lists all the items suggested, how many people received information indicating the link, how many actually clicked on to access it and how many have passed on retweet.

Sharein is not an essential service, not revolutionary. However, it is an interesting way to keep a record of what you found interesting on the web at the same time when he discovers that the other people you know share your opinion. Being free and very easy to use, we recommend its use.

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Via: Sharein.

Some things that are part of our daily life are so simple it’s surprising to remember that at some point in history they had to be created. One example is the banners of the Internet, yesterday, October 27, completed 15 years of life.

In an article for the website AdAge, Frank D’Angelo, baby’s father, says that the first online ads were aired at the launch site HotWired.com, the first digital magazine network for commercial purposes and that the first online advertisers were MCI Volvo, Club Med, and someone named 1-800-Collect.

“Remember that time in the Mosaic (the first web browser) did not have a year and the connections were made by telephone and had a maximum of 24.4 kbps, when you got lucky,” he says. “We decided to put the banners of our clients without their knowledge or consent. The way we thought, if they liked they would be happy to pay us, otherwise all right” track. And even after the idea was accepted, still hovered some doubts about the new media, “some advertisers were uncertain whether they should interact with the online population.” Other times.

At that time, the banners were clicked by no more than 78% of visitors, the overwhelming number before the current rates, which rarely exceed 10%, according to research firm ComSore.

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Via: AdAge.

Living fossil from the age of innocence of the Internet – when you get a dial-up connection was a small sacrifice, the font comic sans was socially acceptable and pornography and boiled down to look for photos of Gillian Anderson – the Geocities terminate their activities today, October 26, after 15 years of service satisfaction to the Internet from other times.

The site GeoCities ceases to exist officially starting on Monday (26) – with the promise of winning alternative to “you to express yourself online,” according to a brief statement on the Internet.

The GeoCities was among the first portals that allow the Internet user to create free any page of any interest (from storing photos to movie reviews, for example, in a space of 15 Mbytes for each site), in HTML format.

The Internet company had already announced plans to overthrow the Geocities in April. “We decided to discontinue the process of allowing new users to enter new accounts on GeoCities, and we focus on helping our customers to explore and build new relationships online, other alternatives,” the company said. The shutdown of the site was announced in July.

For those who are still members and host their sites there, Yahoo! is offering an upgrade to a premium hosting for $ 4.99 monthly.

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Via: CNET.

SeeNow is a very useful tool that lets you add or modify emotions and characteristics of the faces of the people, through their digital photos. With it, you can manipulate pictures of friends, family, co-workers, family members or even famous people who you want (imagine what you could do with Sarah Palin…) to change or tinker with their facial features, putting them in embarrassing or upsetting situations, or even turn them into “characters” of movies to make them more fun or beautiful, for example.

On the site you rely on a variety of brilliant effects, leaving the task to handle photos much more simple, fast and affordable, even for those who do not have the slightest notion of editing. It’s just following the sequence of the interactive program to form a series expressions, postures and environments.

However, the proposal of the website is more than just fun. With the resources that are offered by SeeNow, you can create highly personalized avatars (very useful in discussion forums on a range of topics) and, the most important for SeeNow, can also generate profits if there are partnerships with other partners such as online stores specialized products such as T-shirts, china, posters, etc..

Who would not like to make a joke with a friend through a printed photo on a T- shirt or give a custom gift for someone you care about it?

Via: Crunch Gear and SeeNow.

The in “real time” Web is one of the strongest trends in the Internet. Twitter personifies the term: a Twitter conversation in real time and polls show the results in real time that are going on right now. The Facebook is increasingly adopting tools to enable real-time interaction among its users. Search engines like Collecta scan the internet for the most recent articles from blogs, news articles, tweets and comments displaying them in real time as it goes along.

The social media and real-time Web are changing the way information is transmitted.

The real-time Web emphasizes the time and provides new levels of relationship. Companies can collect instant feedback from their customers on the web. When a client can send a video or their impressions and experiences with a real product or service in real time, in minutes, anywhere in the world, the difference between what was promised and was delivered (positive or negative) will lead social conversation. Listen and respond to the customers through the conversations is a great way to use the media to “influence” the discussions.

Isolation is the major obstacle to innovation in products and services. Moreover, collaboration fosters new ideas and new approaches that may lead to finding solutions to complex problems.

And it was just thinking about it that the already successful website Sphere changed its name to Surphace. The approaches among the various elements that make up the market are by now Surphace to interact in an even more dynamic way.

It is now possible to measure the effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign in real time. Through Surphace everything can be measured and even put ads on alternative and secondary strategies to see what works best rather follow a particular course: to test, refine, test again and then decide where to make their investments based on real data from real customers.

Do I need to say more about the possibilities that Surphace is bringing?

Via: Surphace and Sphere.

Changes in the infrastructure of the internet and in the economy, happened in the last two years, are causing a larger concentration in the traffic of data in the Web. It is what affirms the study done by Arbor Networks and the University of Michigan. Thirty companies, called by them of “hyper giants”, are responsible for a third of whole transport of information in the Internet.

According to the work, the situation was very different five years ago, when the internet traffic was better distributed globally, with dozens of thousands of companies managing websites and servants. Today, there are only a handful of enormous content providers, access and lodging.

Great part of that phenomenon can be attributed to the economical changes that took to the collapse many of the services providers, access and communication in mass of data. In the same way, an ascension of business models was observed based in publicity (inside of websites).

Another effect of that economical change is that, as well as the content consolidation, great providers, like Google, are establishing direct relationships with the consumers, passing over the traditional suppliers.

The report also detached the decrease of the amount of applications and communication protocols for the internet. The development platforms are also in smaller number. If before there were as many platforms as developers, today most already migrated for a small number of them, being one of the most notables the Flash.

Via: The Inquirer.

On last Monday, about a million websites with the ending “.se” disappeared for almost one hour. According to the site Computerworld, the responsible organ for the registration of domains of the country affirmed that the problem was caused by the use of a script configured incorrectly to update the “.se” area, what caused the mistake to each site with this ending.

According to the company Pingdom, whose main business is the monitoring of the Internet, the collapse of a domain of first whole level is exceptionally rare. The normal is that happen problems in inferior levels, when, for instance, a single domain is configured incorrectly.

“Problems that affect a domain of first whole level implicate very big effects, as it can be observed in the case of the incident with the .se. Imagine the same happening with the “.com”, that has more than 80 million sites associated”, it commented on the company.

According to specialists of the area consulted by the company, what happened was that, when they were updating the data, they didn’t put the point (.) of at the domain ending in the files DNS in the that area “.se”.

Although it is a small detail, the forgotten point is necessary in the configurations for DNS to understand that “.se” is a domain of first level. Without it, the whole chain of codes DNS breaks up.

In official note (tinyurl.com/yflb6zx), Sweden’s Internet Infrastructure Foundation, explained the mistake.

Via: Computer World.

Most regular internet browsers for content may perhaps be au fait with ‘remnant advertising’ while many others may still be oblivious to this phenomenon. Hitherto, remnant advertising has been just able to place a number of ads on the site only to fill up unsold ad inventory.

In order to ameliorate the system and turn remnant advertising into premium advertising, a high profile founding team that includes Jim Heckman and Ross Levinsohn, both former Fox Interactive execs have founded a startup called 5to1 by raising $4.5 million. It was launched today at TechCrunch50.

The company aims to provide a service that will do away with both the publishers and advertisers of the extremely ineffective ad campaigns that are only beneficial to the networks selling them. Much to the delight of the publishers, 5to1 system allows them to get in between the remnant networks and the ad inventory. This gives them more control over what will appear on the site, where and when.

Jim Heckman, the CEO of the company puts it in his own words, “Match.com meets iTunes for advertising” as it allows publishers to dynamically create ‘playlists’ of ad units and easily run both proper ads and potentially placeable remnant ads on variable places on their website(s). The ultimate goal of the company is to provide a quality service so that content publishers can easily increase the quality. Only time will tell us how this whole thing works in favor of the publishers.

Via: TechCrunch

Welcome to the pet world! Pet owners can heave a sigh of relief as their pets can fly now in Pet Airways (PAWS), an airline, which is exclusively designed for pets (cats and dogs) to fly to and from New York City, Baltimore/Washington D.C, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles. Hitherto, pets have been pit in the cargo section whenever they fly on an airplane.This most of the time causes a lot of difficulties to the pets.

They find it difficult to breathe at times, and this may cause emotional disturbances to them.Sometimes they even die as well. Interestingly, the only humans on board are the pilots and the airline staffers who give all pets pre-boarding walks and bathroom breaks.Trained attendants do a routine check up of the pets every fifteen minutes during the entire journey. The airline literally takes care of everything and it even provides a Website so that the owners can track the progress of their pets.

Besides, Pet Airways also offers a Frequent Flyer program that awards Pet Points, Pet Airways Affiliated Pet Resorts and other PAWS services as well. The fare for one way travel range from $149.99 to 4399.99 depending on the destination and the size of the pet. You can also book online tickets for your pets much in advance. Pet Airways plans to transport reptiles, birds, pigs and other domesticated household pets later.

Via: Examiner\PetAirways