INFORMATION TRUMPS TITILLATION:

A bulletin is better than sex: Suddenly the news is sexy, and surfing the net to keep up with current affairs on sites such as Ananova is more popular than hunting down X-rated material. (Stewart Kirkpatrick, 27 Sep 2002, The Scotsman)

A survey by Websense, a San Diego company that - surprise, surprise - sells surf monitoring software to employers, says a quarter of workers feel they're addicted to the web. And 23 per cent of them feel that news sites are the most addictive, compared with 18 per cent favouring "adult" content.

In the wake of 9/11, the word "sex" did not appear in the list of the top ten terms entered into search engines - the first time that had ever happened in net history. The trend has continued. Enter the word "sex" on Google, the world's biggest, best search engine, and see 81,600,000 results. Type "news" and 189,000,000 come up. Poor old "porn" can only raise a feeble 25,400,000. [...]

The Pew Research Centre in Washington DC says 61 per cent of people using the web read news online every week. More than a quarter of us read it online every day. The scale of that only becomes apparent when you realise that more than 500 million people use the web. Some quick maths suggests that more than 100 million people worldwide visit news sites on a daily basis.

Of course, in the good old days, when Margaret Thatcher was in the news, you got both. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 6, 2002 1:48 PM