U.S. Kids Bad at Geography. Really Bad.

MSNBC ran an AP story today about a recent Roper poll commissioned by National Geographic. Among 510 respondents, aged 18 to 24, 60% couldn’t find Iraq on a map.

Other major findings:

• One-third of respondents couldn’t pinpoint Louisiana on a map and 48 percent were unable to locate Mississippi.
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The Internet Remote Control

The Center for the Digital Future has some interesting statistics about Internet usage in their recent five year report:

• 78.6 percent of Americans use the Internet and

• Nearly two thirds of Americans are connected at home (more have it at work)

More interesting to me is that Internet users are going online without a specific task or destination in mind....

More Japanese Than English Blog Posts

I knew blogging was big in Japan, but I’m still surprised by the language breakdown in David Sifry’s (of Technorati) latest State of the Blogosphere report. In March 2006, 37% of all blog posts were written in Japanese vs. 31% in English. This despite the fact that there are between two and three as many English as Japanese speakers,...

Consumerist Empowers Shoppers

Back at my Midwestern high school, state law mandated that students could not graduate without having taken a course called consumer seminar. Though a wholly informative course, after college and graduate school, I can’t really remember much about the course or what we learned. I know that I took it during summer school after my junior year of high school and that we spent our last day in class watching this (awesome) movie called “Breaking Away”...

Mainstream Media Vs. Digg

I have a bit of an Alexa problem. I spend a bit more time than is healthy analyzing the reach of website A compared to website B. The result is cheap posts, but I’m going to do one more before I swear off the practice. So here we go:

(1) Of newspaper websites,...