WWW: Beyond the Basics

2. Demographics and Demographic Tools

2.1 Introduction

What is the World Wide Web? According to the Internet Literary Consultants, there are two possible meanings ( Internet Literary Consultants). Coined loosely, it is all the resources that can be accessed using Gopher, FTP, HTTP, telnet, USENET, WAIS and some other tools. The second definition, which is the one that will be used in this chapter, is the "universe of hypertext servers " (HTTP servers) which are servers that allow text, graphics, sound files, etc. to be mixed together.

Although the World Wide Web was first introduced by CERN in 1991, it only really gained popularity and attention with the release of NCSA's Mosaic web browser in 1993. The original version of today's Netscape, Mosaic made the Web and Internet more accessible to the general public through its user-friendly interface and its wide availability across popular platforms. (Mosaic was also free!!) Businesses and the media started to take notice of the Internet and its possibilities, and in 1994, the commercial community began to directly connect to the Internet.

In just three years since its debut, the World Wide Web has at least thirty million users on the Web, and this number is growing rapidly. This chapter focuses on demographics of the World Wide Web: numbers tell a story,and this chapter will provide some insight to these numbers. One good measure of how fast the web has grown is to look at the growth of web sites: it has grown from 130 (Gray, 1996) in June of 1993 to 462,047 (Netcraft Ltd, 1996) in October of 1996.

The first part of this chapter focuses on what web demographics really mean, who is collecting this information, and the reasons for doing so. The methods of collecting demographics on the web are discussed, followed by a survey of web user evolution and characteristics. Demographics of web usage for the purpose of education and commerce are discussed in the next two sections. A conclusion then summarizes this chapter.

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Copyright © 1996 Mei See Yeoh, All Rights Reserved

Mei See Yeoh <myeoh@vt.edu>
Last modified: Sat Oct 26 13:15:51 1996