Digital Media

How much time do you spend online each week? If you're an average Net user, a new poll shows, it's around 13 hours--excluding e-mail.

The Harris Interactive poll, released Wednesday, found that 80 percent of U.S. adults go online, whether at home, work, or elsewhere. Those who surf the Net spend an average of 13 hours per week online, but that figure varies widely. Twenty percent are online for two hours or less a week, while 14 percent are there for 24 hours or more.

The average number of hours that people spend online each week has grown over the years, hovering at 7 hours from 1999 through 2002, 8 or 9 hours from 2003 through 2006, and 11 hours in 2007. The level hit its peak at 14 hours in October 2008--after the global recession had set in and just before the U.S. presidential election.

The jump in time spent in cyberspace likely stems from a few factors, according to Harris. More people are comfortable using the Internet. More of them are shopping and watching TV online. In addition, the number of Web sites and online applications has increased. Harris adds that the recession may also play a role since surfing the Net at home is free (after paying monthly access fees), while going out means spending money.

The age group that spent the most time online per week: 30- to 39-year-olds, at 18 hours.

The total number of U.S. adults on the Internet is 184 million, around 80 percent of the total population, according to the poll. That figure is virtually the same as in 2008 but is a big jump from 1999, when it reached at 56 percent, and from 1995, when the figure was a mere 9 percent.

The number of people who surf the Net at home rose to 76 percent this year, compared with 66 percent in 2005, 46 percent in 1999, and 16 percent in 1996. In 1995, that specific question wasn't even asked.

The Harris poll queried 2,029 people in early July and mid-October.

Here are the poll results:

(Credit: Harris Interactive)

Sex, porn, and Michael Jackson were among the most popular items kids searched for online in 2009, as tracked by Symantec's OnlineFamily.Norton.

Symantec on Thursday revealed the top 100 favorite search terms among children 18 and under found by its free OnlineFamily.Norton service, which helps parents monitor their kids' online searches. Though innocuous terms like Sesame Street and "New Moon"--a popular movie in the Twilight vampire series--made the cut, sex showed up fourth on the list for boys and fifth for girls, following YouTube, Google, and Facebook as the three top terms.

Top 10 search terms by boys and girls for 2009

(Credit: Symantec)

For boys, the top 25 search terms focused on social-networking sites, shopping sites, and certain adult terms. Girls seemed to favor subjects related to music, TV shows and movies, and celebrities.

Speaking of celebrities, to no one's surprise, the late Michael Jackson was the most searched for celebrity, coming in at number 12, followed by pop singer Taylor Swift at No. 13. Other hot stars that made the list included Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, Beyonce, the Black Eyed Peas, the Jonas Brothers, Eminem, Rihanna, and Chris Brown (who was in the news this year after admitting that he assaulted ex-girlfriend Rihanna).

Searching for celebrities online, however, may be hazardous to your PC's health. Symantec has found found that these searches sometimes draw people to dangerous Web sites, which spew out viruses, spam, and other malware.

Kids seven and under searched for items related to video games, while older kids were heavy into music, with 34 percent of teens and 27 percent of tweens searching for music-related topics. The Miley Cyrus song "Party in the USA" was the most-searched for tune among kids, while "Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eye Peas took the No. 2 spot.

Top 10 searches by age group for 2009

(Credit: Symantec)

Tech terms that popped up on the list included MySpace at No. 8, MSN at No. 33, the iPod Touch at No. 98, and Bing last at No. 100.

To compile its top 100 list, Symantec tracked 14.6 million searches run by users of its OnlineFamily.Norton service and ranked the terms according to ones submitted most frequently to those submitted the least. The terms were collected anonymously, so none could be associated with any specific children or families.

DARPA says the balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.

(Credit: DARPA)

Update at 10:56 p.m. PST: The MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team (PDF) has won the competition.

You may have heard about that DARPA balloon challenge, where the first team to identify the latitudes and longitudes of 10 moored weather balloons across the continental U.S. wins $40,000? Well, as of Saturday, the balloons are up in the air. If you don't have a team yet, here are some places to report a sighting.

What's cool is how most of the balloon-hunting communities I've found are working toward selfless goals. Both DARPABalloon.com and this MIT group are proposing to gather a huge number of participants, and rather than give each contributor a measly cut, the 40 grand will be donated to charity.

DARPA is holding its Network Challenge to mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet. The competition is meant to explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

So, good luck to everyone involved. If you happen to stumble across one this weekend, consider reporting it to a group that's playing for charity. Just make sure it's not a red balloon some kid let go of first.

This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.

Two days ahead of a new round of planned protests against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Internet access in the nation's capital is largely down, according to Agence France Presse.

During the post-election unrest in June, Twitter became a main avenue for Iranians' communication with the outside world.

(Credit: Twitter)

Sources close to Iran's technical services say the cut to Tehran's outside access was the result of "a decision by the authorities" and not a technical breakdown, the news agency reports. Telecommunications ministry officials were unavailable for comment.

Protests are scheduled Monday to mark Student Day, the anniversary of the December 6, 1953, killing of three of University of Tehran students by Iranian police. The students were protesting then-U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon's visit, which followed the CIA-sponsored overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq.

As the nation gets ready to mark the annual day of remembrance, several Web sites have reported that Iranian opposition groups are preparing to hold fresh protests against Ahmadinejad. Scores of arrests have already been reported in advance of Student Day.

Since widespread post-election upheaval broke out in June amid charges of government vote-rigging, Internet lines, texting, and even mobile phone service have been cut or scrambled. But the weekend's Internet outage marks the first such occurrence to take place this far in advance of protests, AFP reports.

A new DARPA contest is using balloons to test our social-networking skills.

After kicking off the Internet 40 years ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is again tapping into the Net for a new challenge. The DARPA Network Challenge will award $40,000 to the first person who can identify the latitudes and longitudes of 10 red weather balloons positioned at different parts of the sky across the continental United States.

The 8-foot balloons are scheduled to lift off on Saturday at 7 a.m. PST and remain in their locations throughout the day, until sunset. The contest will be open until December 14, so contestants will have a little more than a week to gather up and submit their answers.

But the contest has a twist. Since no one person can identify all 10 balloons across the States in one day, challengers will need to rely on social networks to team up with others to pinpoint the locations of the balloons. DARPA's goal here is not to see if people can answer the question but to gauge how we use social networks to resolve a problem.

DARPA plans to launch 10 red weather balloons, somewhat larger than the one shown here, around the continental United States, and competitors are invited to try to identify the precise latitudes and longitudes of all 10 balloons to win a $40,000 prize.

(Credit: U.S. Air Force photo/Chief Master Sgt. Gary Emery)

"We are not interested in the balloons. We already know where those are," Norman Whitaker, DARPA's deputy director of transformational convergence technology, said in a statement. "It's the techniques people use to solve the challenge we're focused on. We have people who are going to be actively watching from the sidelines to see how this plays out."

Whitaker is hoping the contest will offer insight into how the Internet and social networks can help people build teams and collaborate with each other to solve real problems and challenges.

DARPA is leaving it up to the contestants to best figure out how to work with others to track the balloons. One example posed by Whitaker is that of using a Web site to offer a portion of the prize to anyone who shares info about the locations of the balloons. Another idea is to work with a charity and donate your winnings. People can also naturally ask for help through Web-based tools such as Facebook or Twitter, connecting via computers or smartphones.

Although the challenge may be tough, Whitaker believes that at least one person will be able to solve it, whether it takes five minutes or all day. But if no one responds with the locations of all 10 balloons by the December 14 deadline, the agency will reward the $40,000 to the first person who tracked down at least five of them.

DARPA isn't sure yet what it will do with the information it finds. But that's never stopped the agency before. "We're DARPA," Whitaker said. "We like to do things that are really out of the box."

The agency enjoys a history of out-of-the-box challenges. Past contests have set up races between unmanned, robotic vehicles, including DARPA's 2005 Grand Challenge and its 2007 Urban Grand Challenge.

Are you willing to take the DARPA challenge? How would you use the Internet and social networks to win the prize?

The unveiling of the iPhone, the debut of Twitter, and the growth of Craigslist are just three of the decade's most influential Internet moments, as judged by the Webby Awards.

The folks behind the Webby Awards, presented each year for excellence on the Internet, dove into the top 10 craze this week, laying out their picks for the Internet developments of the past 10 years that have had the greatest reverberations. (And no, they're not a year ahead of schedule, despite the tendency of list makers to rally in years that end in '10. The decade technically runs from 2000 to 2009, with 2010 being the start of the next decade.)

The Webby Awards rundown of the decade in chronological order:

• Craigslist moving outside San Francisco in 2000 to revamp the whole notion of classified ads, striking fear in the hearts of newspapers everywhere.
• The launch of Google AdWords in 2000, opening up a new world of advertising for businesses both large and small.
• The start of Wikipedia in 2001 showing off the Internet's ability to let online strangers collaborate, leading to more than 14 million articles in 271 different languages.
• The takedown of Napster in 2001, triggering a revolution in the way we now grab our music and videos.
• Google's IPO in 2004, creating a massive, dominant, and far-reaching force on the Internet.
• The online video revolution in 2006 triggered by beefy bandwidth, cheap camcorders, and YouTube, flooding cyberspace with an array of professional and not-so-professional videos.
• The expansion of Facebook and the debut of Twitter in 2006, creating a fresh way for us to interact and communicate with friends and family.
• The launch of the iPhone in 2007, helping us hop onto the Internet anywhere, anytime through a cell phone.
• The U.S. presidential campaign in 2008 tapping into the Internet with videos like "Obama Girl," social networking use among voters, and online fundraising.
• The Iranian election protesters in 2009 using Twitter to spread their word, a movement that prompted the U.S. State Department to ask Twitter to keep the site up and running.

That's a pretty good list, but of course it immediately started us thinking about the influential Internet-related moments and developments from 2000 to 2009 that got short shrift or that got left off entirely.

Our list, in no particular order:

• The debut and growth of Firefox: The first browser to challenge the IE monopoly, Firefox now holds a 25 percent market share, paving the way for other players like Google Chrome.
• The arrival of blogging: Started as simple online diaries, blogs have grown to become a valid and valued source of news, opinion, and information. As a corollary, there's the rise of RSS, which lets the latest information come to us instead of our having to go out and find it.
• The surge in broadband: The availability of DSL, cable, satellite, and now Fios put a nail in the coffin for dial-up access, letting us download files in seconds, watch each other on webcams, and stream high-res videos.
• The allure of torrents: Whether used for legal or illegal file sharing, technologies like BitTorrent let us share and download all types of content across the Web from movies and TV shows to software. And speaking of movies and TV--the popularity of sites like Hulu and Netflix demonstrated that you no longer need a costly cable TV subscription to indulge your viewing inclinations.
• The reinvention of the telephone. On the one hand, there were VoIP services such as Skype, which saved us from expensive long-distance bills. On the other was 3G technology and mobile broadband, which let us jump into cyberspace from our phones, Netbooks, and a host of other portable gadgets.
• The rise of home workers: Thanks to the Internet, you can now run a full-fledged business or work for your employer without having to leave the house. There's also online education--with many accredited schools now online, today you can attend college or graduate school and get a full degree from your own computer.
• The ascent of Salesforce and cloud computing: With the success of cloud-computing providers like Salesforce, companies can now run much of their business online without the hassle of maintaining their own internal resources.
• The looming menace of cyberwarfare: On the downside, the Internet showed signs of becoming a new virtual battleground between countries, as in the purported cyberattacks against Estonia and Georgia.
• The lessons of the dot-com crash: The decade was barely under way when that bubble burst hard; wildly inflated stocks were tanking and Wall Street was reeling, frenetically hyped Web companies were imploding, and our retirement plans took a beating. That seem so long ago now, what with the current miserable state of the economy, post-housing bubble crash.

Do you agree or disagree with those picks? Sound off in the comments section below.

Although technology and the Internet have taken a beating in the past for potentially limiting people's social interaction, a new study from the Pew Research Center has found that the opposite might be true.

According to a Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey, which polled 2,512 adults, the dawn of new technology and the Internet has not caused people to withdraw from society. In fact, the study found that "the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then." Pew said that 6 percent of the entire U.S. adult population currently has "no one with whom they can discuss important matters or who they consider to be 'especially significant' in their life."

That said, Pew did find that Americans' "discussion networks"--a measure of people's "most important social ties"--have shrunk "by about a third since 1985" from three people to two. However, Pew found no evidence to suggest that it had anything to do with mobile phones or the Internet. In fact, the organization's study found that mobile-phone use and active Web participation yields "larger and more diverse core discussion networks."

Social media is also helping people expand their social interaction. According to Pew, those who use the Internet frequently "are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race." Users who share photos online are more likely to discuss political topics with someone of a different party, the organization found.

Do you know your neighbor?
Frequent Web users are more likely to communicate with neighbors in person than those who don't use the Web as often, Pew found. In fact, 61 percent of respondents said that they talk to a neighbor at least once per month. The study also found that bloggers are 72 percent "more likely to belong to a local voluntary association" than those who don't blog.

Perhaps most important, Pew found that just because someone is a heavy Web user, that doesn't mean they remove themselves from traditional social activities like visiting a restaurant or hanging out at a bar on a Friday night. According to the study, Web users are "45 percent more likely to visit a cafe, 52 percent more likely to visit a library, 34 percent more likely to visit a fast-food restaurant, 69 percent more likely to visit other restaurants, and 42 percent more likely to visit a public park." Later on, the study reported that social-networking users "are 40 percent more likely to visit a bar, but 36 percent less likely to visit a religious institution."

So, next time your grandmother tells you that the Web is ruining the world, you might want to tell her to check out Pew's study. For more on these figures and many more, click here.

Helped by cost cuts and by growth in Internet and phone subscribers, Comcast on Wednesday reported a 22 percent jump in earnings for its third quarter.

The cable provider saw net income of $944 million, or 33 cents per share, for the quarter ended Sept. 30, compared with $771 million (26 cents per share) in the year-ago quarter. Sales also rose, hitting $8.8 billion, up from $8.5 billion in 2008's third quarter, though revenue was slightly below analysts' estimates.

Comcast's third-quarter sales

(Credit: Comcast)

For the quarter, the number of TV subscribers dropped 2.7 percent to 23.7 million from 24.4 million a year ago. But the loss was more than offset by gains in Internet and voice, two services that Comcast has marketed heavily, especially as part of its Triple-Play service.

The number of Internet subscribers rose 6.4 percent to 15.6 million, while Comcast phone customers jumped 20 percent to 7.3 million. Overall, the company saw a quarterly increase in customers of 3.4 percent to 46.8 million. Subscriber growth helped boost third-quarter sales for the cable segment by 2.8 percent to $8.4 billion.

Comcast Internet and voice customers grow.

(Credit: Comcast)

With a focus on trimming costs, capital expenses declined 6.1 percent to $1.2 billion, due in large part to lower spending at the company's cable divison.

"The strength and resilience of our businesses combined with our continued emphasis on expenses and prudent capital management helped us achieve healthy operating and financial results in the third quarter," Brian Roberts, chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Comcast revealed no new details over its intent to acquire a leading stake in GE-owned NBC Universal. Early last month, reports surfaced that the company wanted to buy a 51 percent chunk of NBCU, with GE owning the rest, to create a new joint venture. If it goes through, the deal could transform Comcast into a major media powerhouse, with control of NBC as well as variety of TV networks and cable stations.

The organization responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses has approved a new plan to allow non-Latin characters in Web extensions.

Known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), the system is designed to globalize the Net so regions around the world can use their own local alphabet characters to surf in cyberspace, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, said Friday.

Calling IDNs the "biggest technical change" to the Internet since its birth 40 years ago, ICANN unanimously approved the plan on the final day of its six-day conference in Seoul.

IDNs will allow domain names to be to be written in native character sets, such as Chinese, Arabic, and Greek. In charge of managing domain names, ICANN has argued that IDNs are necessary to expand use of the Web in regions where people don't understand English. Since its inception, the Internet has been limited to the Latin character set used by the U.S. and many other nations.

"The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago," said ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush in a statement. "Right now Internet address endings are limited to Latin characters--A to Z. But the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names."

To expedite the new plan, ICANN will launch a Fast Track process on November 16. At that time, the organization will begin accepting applications from countries for new top level domains, or Internet extensions, based on each nation's character set.

Initially, the change will apply only to local country codes, such as .kr for Korea and .ru for Russia. Major top level domains (TLDs) such as .com, .net., and .org won't see non-Latin editions just yet. But ICANN is pushing to make progress on these major TLDs and hopes to include them in the IDN system before long.

ICANN had discussed and debated IDNs for years, during which time much testing, development, and global cooperation were needed to jump start the new system.

"This is a culmination of years of work, tests, study and discussion by the ICANN community," said Thrush. "To see this finally start to unfold is to see the beginning of an historic change in the Internet and who uses it."