I’m fascinated by social science research, market research and how people work, think and everything else. However, you can only browse the Statistics Canada website so many times before you want to find something else. For those keeping score at home, Canadians use the Internet intensively. In 2007, Toronto had the most Facebook users of any city in the world; 10% of the city’s population used the website. A new study reported in the SLAW blog has found that not only do Canadians use Internet search engines far more intensively than Americans and, “YouTube, Google’s video streaming site, is more popular in Canada than in any other country.” Very interesting. This is a bit of a wonder actually considering that Canadian Internet access is nothing to brag about according to an OECD study on the issue. As reported by the CBC, Canada is lagging behind many other countries including South Korea and Denmark on many measures such as price, Internet access speeds and so forth.
Most of the best, cutting edge recent on Canadian Internet usage appears to come from companies such as comScore and Google. They are a good source of some basic information on usage but it does tend to be tilted toward the needs of advertisers. What I want to see is a Canadian equivalent or branch of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project which regularly publishes original and very interesting research.
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