Top ten findings from the Internet In New Zealand 2007 report

The World Internet Project New Zealand report came out. Worth a look as it is part of a great world-wide project, and will hopefully provide great trends going forward..

Sadly the data is old. Really old in internet time. The WIPNZ survey was conducted in September-October 2007. Why does it take 8 months to analyse it and write a report?

Also the survey excluded those without landlines – like many heavy internet users, and at the bottom end as well.

I would also like to see the actual numbers on charts, and some source data so that we can do our own analysis. But still – great information and we should all be glad to have it.

Here are my top ten factoids from the report.

1: The internet is rated as the most important information source – beating out TV, radio, newspapers and other people. (61% of people rated the internet as important versus 50’s and 40’s for the rest.)

2: While the internet is used for a bunch of stuff, not much actual time per day is spent on searching for information on travel, health, entertainment or employment compared with news and “fact checking” – whatever that is.

3: Asking about reliability of information on the web is like asking about reliability of information you hear from “people” or “in print”. It’s simply a media, and inside the media there are credible and not so credible sources. The way the question was asked was better than most, but a true answer for how much of the information on the internet is reliable would be a very low score, due to the link spammers and so forth.

A better question could be “how much of what you read on the internet is reliable”. So I could conceive myself answering anything from “Little” to “All” on this question, depending upon whether I was thinking about “contents of the internet” or stuff I read on the internet”. So please ignore this chart:

4: The internet is like newspapers, not radio or TV. More about information and less about mindless drivel entertainment.

5: A bunch of us feel more like Kiwis due to the internet. At the very least it hasn’t torn us apart. I for one certainly feel more Kiwi.

Snip. Sorry for those on feeds but I’m putting the rest behind the More… wall to reduce loading time for the page.

6: We are miles away from being able shop regularly online – Trade Me notwithstanding. Very few people buy something online each week, and we will suffer in this category versus other Western countries when the comparative report comes out later in the year.

7: 24% of respondents said they don’t get email spam. Who are these people? Do they not recognise spam when they get it?

8: Old folk don’t use the internet much, especially social networks. This is no surprise, but if you are running a website business then this should be front and center.

All the usage charts showed similar trends – this is whether they use the internet or not.

9: Asians blog a lot, a whole lot, versus everybody else. By why are Pasifika bloggers so much more prevalent than Maori? Is it a way to stay connected back home?

Is that why the internet is more important for both ethnicities than Maori?

10: Access to the internet shows that the digital divide is not so bad in New Zealand – higher income folk have more broadband, but the shape of that curve is not too pronounced. Let’s just see it lift across all income levels.

However the importance of the internet increases dramatically with income, showing a divide that goes beyond “do you have broadband”, and probably requires a better definition of what broadband actually is.

I see now an NZHerald article and a Public Address entry.