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Shocked aren’t ya? It really is two days before Christmas because there is just not much happening. The folks at Harris Interactive are still working though and reporting that we are spending more time online than ever before. This will surprise no one but the report digs into some of the specifics of age groups which is always of interest. Honestly though, no surprises there either. TechCrunch tells a little about the study and what possible effects on the results could be: Harris concludes that the average hours spent online have increased from 7 hours from 1999 to 2002, to between 8 and 9 hours in 2003 to 2006, and surged after that. There was a sudden spike in time spent online in 2007 when the average hours spent on the Web increased to 11 hours. Last year, Internet users were online for 14 hours a week, double what it was from 1999 to 2002, although Harris says this could have something to do with the outbreak of the financial crisis and the lead-up to the presidential election in October 2008. The study is about personal time on line and is not inclusive of e-mail time. Based on that, we are talking about just short of 2 hours per day online on average. Here is the data that may be of service to you. There are no real surprises here. I think the shock of the proliferation of the online life is wearing off. There are likely to be other spikes moving forward like the increase of use of the mobile web that will be the new measure of growth online. I suspect that if Harris did some polling around that there would be great interest in the trending. Maybe that will help us identify when the real “Year of Mobile” was or is to be.

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We Are Spending More Time Online According to Harris

No wonder I have had this feeling lately that I am always full and the waistline is expanding a bit. It’s all this information and data that I am ingesting on a daily basis. Boy, if only limiting my data intake time would make the waistline go away I’d be there in a heartbeat but I digress. We all know that the average person is taking in more information on a daily basis than ever before but just how much is too much? According to the New York Times : The average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data and information each day — an increase of about 350 percent over nearly three decades according to a report published Wednesday by researchers at the University of California, San Diego . According to calculations in the report, that daily information diet includes about 100,000 words, both those read in print and on the Web as well as those heard on television and the radio. By comparison, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” contains about 460,000 words. Phew! Sounds like a lot of stuff to stuff in. Now to be fair, this amount of information is not exclusively confined to the online space. The study looks at television, radio, the Web, text messages and video games. Now, I am not an online gamer so that last one has me a little bit confused since that activity often appears to serve the opposite effect of draining someone’s brain so feel free to yell at me and tell me I am wrong. Television (another fine brain extraction tool which has done its damage on me over the years) takes up the first place in time committed daily that creates information overload clocking in at 5 hours a day. Second is radio, which the average American listens to for about 2.2 hours a day. The computer comes in third, at just under two hours a day. Video games take up about an hour, and reading takes up 36 minutes. While the report says that the printed word gets less attention the reality is that people are reading more than ever because of their online habits. Also, there is the phenomenon of much of this activity happening simultaneously as in texting while watching TV. It’s exhausting just thinking about it. As Internet marketers these studies are important because there is just a ridiculous amount of competition for peoples’ attention. The resulting din of data and noise makes it even more important to find a way to get people at a time when THEY are ready to hear your message. The old intrusive selling model is growing less and less effective because people actually control their time more than ever as it relates to media. They engage when they want to engage where they want to engage. It used to be that you take what you get. Those days are gone. So what is your technique to cut through the noise? Is the level of noise going to continue to increase thus making it more daunting to cut through or will there come a time when a person says “I can’t eat another gig!” What’s your take?

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TMI? Americans Take In 34 Gigs of Data A Day

Google is always testing and tweaking its search interface. More recently, the search engine has tested a minimalist homepage design . Well, apparently that homepage might be a little too simple for the search-challenged, as the latest version adds the rather obvious “Press Enter to Search” text. I know that I’m not representative of the average search user, but I’m shocked that the average user might not know to simply click “enter” in the absence of any “search” button. Let this be a reminder to all web site owners. If the most popular–and easiest to use–web site in the world has to point out the obvious, you shouldn’t take for granted that your visitors will know how to use your site.

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Are There a Lot of Dumb People Using Google?