Читать книгу Manage Your Online Reputation - Tony Wilson - Страница 6

Like the telephone in the early twentieth century; the fax machine in the ’70s; voice mail in the ’80s; email and online forums in the ’90s; and blogs, instant messaging, and text messaging on smartphones in the ’00s; in this decade, online communication through social networking and other social media is the way many people relate to each other now.

The online environment we live in today, when compared with the environment in 1990 or even 2000, is quite unlike any in which we have ever lived. It’s a different world than the one I grew up in. This world has its own customs, protocols, conventions, inside jokes, and taboos.

The Internet wasn’t invented by former US Vice President Al Gore. It really started in 1969 as a US Department of Defense project called Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) and connected four US universities to exchange information across a network of computers. The web browser only came into existence with the development of Mosaic in 1993. In the mid-’90s, commercial services such as AOL and CompuServe started offering access to the Internet through subscribed services.

A survey done in December 2009, performed by Pew Internet & American Life Project, revealed that —

• 74 percent of all American adults (ages 18 and older) use the Internet;

• 60 percent of American adults use broadband connections at home; and

• 55 percent of American adults connect to the Internet wirelessly, either through a WiFi or related connection on their laptop, BlackBerry, iPhone, or other wireless device.

As for email, The Radicati Group, a technology market research company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, estimates that 247 billion emails per day were sent in 2009 (of which 81 percent were estimated to be spam, leaving perhaps 47 billion legitimate emails per day). The Radicati Group also estimated that the average corporate user sends and receives approximately 110 messages daily, and around 18 percent of those emails are spam, which includes actual spam and what is termed graymail (i.e., unwanted newsletters, alerts). As of May 2010, there were 2.9 billion email user accounts, and this is expected to grow to 3.8 billion by 2014.

In The Radicati Group’s “Email Statistics Report, 2010” (available at Radicati.com), in 2010, 75 percent of all email accounts were owned by consumers, and 25 percent were owned by businesses. This 75/25 ratio is expected to stay constant until 2014. Of all the email users, 47 percent are located in Asia and the Pacific (i.e., China, India, Japan, Oceania), while 23 percent of email accounts are in Europe, and 14 percent in North America.