Latinos lagging in Internet use, report states
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, March 17, 2007
Latinos are not going online as much as non-Hispanic whites and blacks, even at younger ages where Internet use is far greater, according to a report released Wednesday.
Fifty-six percent of adult Latinos use the Internet, compared with 70 percent of whites and about 60 percent of blacks, according to the Pew Hispanic Center and the Pew Internet &American Life Project.
The Internet use of U.S.-born Latinos is comparable to that of whites, but about two-thirds of adult Latinos in the United States were born elsewhere.
The study found that only one in three Spanish-dominant Latinos use the Internet. Latinos online tend to be primarily English speakers or bilingual and have graduated from college and high school.
Measuring Web traffic gets more accurate:
The online measurement service comScore Media Metrix has come up with a new way of measuring Web traffic as new technologies increasingly make one of the current industry yardsticks less meaningful.
ComScore said Wednesday it is now reporting on site “visits” – defined as the number of times a person returns to a site with a break of at least a half-hour.
Currently, sites and advertisers often use page views, a figure that reflects the number of Web pages a visitor pulls from a site.
However, many sites are increasingly using a software trick called Ajax to improve the user experience. It allows sites to update data automatically and continually, without users needing to pull up new pages. Page views decline as a result.
ComScore and its rival, Nielsen/NetRatings, also report unique audience – the number of visitors to a site in a given month, whether that person visits once for 10 seconds or several times. The measurement helps advertisers know they aren’t displaying ads to the same people over and over, even if the site draws significant page views.
Audio and video fans take note:
A Silicon Valley startup hoping to become “the Google of audio and video” introduced software this week that trolls the Internet for podcasts, music and videos, then sorts the clips into categories such as “fashionista,” “hip hop” and “gossip snoop.”
Divvio Inc. – whose 12 employees occupy a squat office next to a highway onramp – came out of stealth mode Tuesday. Hossein Eslambolchi resigned as chief technology officer and chief information officer of AT&T Inc. in January 2006 to become founder and CEO.
Divvio’s Web-crawling software is available in a “beta” test version at divvio.com, with an official version expected within several months.
Users of the free, advertiser-supported site may create unique “channels” on any subject – from weddings to epidemiology – and share them with others. Content is streamed to any device with a Web browser.
Microsoft’s Windows Live gets a boost:
Lenovo Group Ltd. became the first computer maker to agree to pre-load Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Live toolbar and make its search portal the main service on all new computers worldwide.
The deal announced by the two companies Wednesday could help Microsoft in its bid to compete with Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. for traffic.
Google leads the Internet search industry with a 54 percent share of the market, followed by Yahoo with 23 percent, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Microsoft’s search engine is in third place with 8.9 percent of the market.
Lenovo, the world’s third-largest PC manufacturer, will load Microsoft’s toolbar on laptop and desktop computers, the companies said. The toolbar includes one-click access to Microsoft’s Live Search service.
From Herald new services
