Spending more time on the internet can help you understand new technology, but would that just be ‘cyberloafing’? John Tate sets the challenge.

Forty years ago, back in 1973, the internet was ‘invented’. Today the web plays a significant role in both our work and personal lives.

Internet-based solutions at work offer us the opportunity to do things more effectively and improve the lives of the benefi ciaries of our cause. Investment cases to develop new web-based solutions are being put in front of boards and are being signed off in increasing numbers.

Understanding

However, much has changed with the web since its creation. So how well do you really understand the internet and its use today? Are you a bit of a dinosaur or are you at the heart of leading-edge technology? Is your organisation taking full advantage of what the internet has to offer – or is it a laggard? Should you spend more time keeping up-to-date with what the web has to offer?

To help you decide, let us have a look at web use today.

There is a global online population of over two billion people – equivalent to about 30 per cent of the world’s inhabitants.

In terms of use, figure 1 shows how people spend their time on the internet.

So does this tally with your perception of web use? How familiar are you with social networking tools for example?

I guess the stereotype of an accountant would suggest that they do not make much use of social networking or multimedia sites. If this is the case you might like to brush up your knowledge of how people use this technology. For example, social media can drive online fundraising.

Research in the US suggests that 75 per cent of young people make donations to charities and the majority of these do so via the web (source: the Chronicle of Philanthropy).

Figure 1: Time spent on the internet
	%
Social networking	22
Searches	21
Research/content	20
Email/communications	19
Multimedia sites	13
Online shopping	5
	100

If your organisation engages in fundraising activity, how on-the-ball are you with the opportunities the web offers?

Drilling down in more detail on web use an organisation called Alexa produces interesting information, including which websites are the most visited in the world. Their top-ten list is: google; Facebook; YouTube; Yahoo; Baidu; Wikipedia; Windows Live; QQ; Amazon; and Twitter.

You can be somewhat reassured if you have heard of and used the majority of these sites. Incidentally, Baidu is the leading Chinese search engine and QQ.com China’s largest ISP (internet service portal).

However, if you look at the fastest-growing sites the picture may be rather different. For example, Time magazine produced a list of the top 50 websites of 2012.

This list includes the following ‘productivity products’: Loosecubes; The email game; Personal Capital; and Prezi. and ‘social sites’: Cowbird; Clipboard; Reddit; and Digg.

How many of these are familiar to you?

Latest offerings

Is now the time for you to become more familiar with the web’s latest offerings? The argument goes that spending time on the internet will help you understand the relevance of technology to your organisation and enable you to make informed decisions on investment in this area.

Or will this research just take up a load of unnecessary time and effort? If you want evidence to support this view, you need look no further than a new study carried out last month by Kansas State University suggesting we spend even more time than previously thought aimlessly browsing the internet during our office hours.

‘Cyberloafing’ – wasting time at work online – apparently takes up as much as 80 per cent of the time people spend online at work. That’s even more food for thought.

John Tate is a business consultant, IT adviser to CFG and a visiting lecturer at Cass Business School