[Air-l] Re: thanks to Air-l
Bram Dov Abramson
babramson at telegeography.com
Sat Aug 11 12:15:00 PDT 2001
>Commercial site:
>Industry Almanac: http://www.c-i-a.com/199809iu.htm
> Nua: http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi),
> CyberAtlas - http://cyberatlas.internet.com
> E-Marketer - (http://www.emarketer.com
>www.telegeography.com
>
>Organizations:
>http://www.oecd.org//dsti/sti/it/prod/it-out2000-e.htm
>http://www.undp.org/hdr2001/
>http://www.itu.int
>http://www.idc.com.
Actually IDC is a commercial site -- which charges far, far higher
prices than any of the "commercial sites" listed for anything they
publish, as it happens. (On the converse side is E-Marketer, whose
research process consists of "aggregating" the work that everyone
else does.)
Keep in mind too that many, even most, of these statistics tend to
rest heavily on the others. This is especially the case for Internet
user statistics: ITU, eMarketer, and NUA all recompile other data and
add it together, despite what are often fairly important differences
in methodology between the different data sets they are reusing. Not
sure what ILO is using, and can't recall off the top of my head
what's in the HDR -- IDC, maybe? -- but it would be surprising were
their research not compiled from somewhere else.
(OECD has some nice and fairly cautious numbers on broadband deployment
AFAIK the only original research on human Internet user populations
in the work above is that undertaken by very large firms such as IDC;
another source is Ipsos-Reid (formerly Angus Reid), the Canadian
company now owned by France's Ipsos. I'm not sure how the fellow at
C-I-A compiled his data, but I believe -- this is usually the case --
it has to do with multiples of Internet hosts; the multiplier may be
derived as dependent on other variables.
The reason for this paucity is, of course, that sizing Internet user
populations is an incredibly expensive and time-consuming process. A
really interesting doctoral thesis to read would be one which took
apart and compared the various methodologies as a way of explaining
the wide divergences in results. Or: data points are memes, and they
travel, but in so doing they obscure their origins; call it a fetish
for numbers.
cheers
Bram
--
/ Bram Dov Abramson
/ babramson at telegeography.com
/
/ Director of Internet Research
/ TeleGeography, Inc.
/
/ tel: +1 202 741 0047 (new numbers)
/ fax: +1 202 741 0021 (we've moved)
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