Online Population now Half Billion

mattvd writes "According to CNN, the number of people with Web access at home by the end of 2001 was 498 million." Not surprisingly, Asia is growing the fastest. It's amazing that in only 10 years or so, the net has exploded so far, so fast, and now touches 10% of the earths population.

Comments

A little perspective...

[isaac]

I'm not surprised that the internet has reached 10% of the world's population - it's the richest 10%. I'll be more (pleasantly) surprised when the internet reaches 30% of the world's population - because then it will truly have made inroads into currently unserved or underserved populations - i.e. the 85% of the world that lives in what people in the US, EU, Japan, S. Korea, etc. would call abject poverty. (People in the 80th or 70th percentile, though, are themselves significantly wealthier than the 60% of the world's population that could truly be described as economically poor.)

For a little perspective, check out the brochure from the ITU World Telecommunication Development Conference 2002. A hopeful note, according to that link: "Africa now has more than twice as many main telephone connections as Tokyo and 85 percent of today's world population share 45 percent of all telephone lines (see Figure 1). In comparison, in 1984, 90 percent of the world's people used only ten percent of all telephone lines."

-Isaac

Re:Slashdot/Asia?

[President Chimp Toe]

Let's just hope there's no Slashdot-Asia planned for the near future. That would REALLY take the Slashdot effect to a new level....

Erm, there is dude. Check it out, its japanese.

When we get chinese slashdot, then we really start frigging worrying.

Nielsen/Net Ratings - more data

[fleener]

Here is the PDF from Nielsen. It contains more data than the CNN story.