Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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All well and good, but what about speeds? The rural digital divide is getting bigger not smaller.

Great article - really appreciating the visual. Would be interested in seeing similar data for US cities as well!

Richard - I agree with you about speed. My parents, who live in a rural area, have certainly experienced this issue.

SEOJ - I had a look at the US data, and it looks like the story isn't quite the same.

For Shopping and Classifieds, Oregon is the state that over-indexes most, while California is indeed uder represented. However, New York is also over represented. Of course, this is a slightly trickier exercise in the US than UK as most of the states are so large that they include both rural and urban areas - California being a good example.

The picture for social networking is different again. The West coast states (inc. California, Oregon and Washington) and the South (inc. Texas but excluding Florida) are all over represented, while most of the rest is under represented, especially the Midwest and North East.

Thanks, Robin

Very interesting post!

Regarding social networking however, what strikes me is that it seems that the regions with the highest Internet penetration appear to be the ones with the lowest social networking activity (this is true for London and the South of the UK as well as for example California in the US).

I wonder whether these results are more a highlight of the digital divide than a counter-argument. I would expect that e.g. in London a big chunk of the population has Internet access but as usual at is predominantly the young that use it for social networking which make up a smaller part of the whole urban Internet population.
In rural areas instead it will be predominantly the younger people that have Internet access and these of course also use social networking, leading to this picture.

Would that be a possible explanation?

btw, maybe of interest to some readers of this post: The Network in the Garden, a paper comparing urban and rural MySpace users in the US: http://social.cs.uiuc.edu/people/gilbert/21/paper-the-network-in-the-garden

well, thats sorta obvious. its harder for them to go shopping + the gas prices.

I can't help feeling that classifying anyone not in London as a 'broadband bumpkin' is just a teensy bit of a generalisation! Looking at the variation by region I think there might be a correlation with travel times - ie if you spend a lot of time travelling to and from work you have less time to spend on social networking. Plus if you work in a city you can go to an actual shop without spending hours getting there. I'm only 6 miles from Reading but I'd rather shop online if I can because it takes so long to get in and out (and retailers seem supremely uninterested in taking my money if the queues at tills are anything to go by!)

It is a pity then that not more local shops in Wales use the Internet to tap into the seeming Welsh internet interest. Most rural towns are experiencing a drop in direct custom - maybe a web site to lure locals and visitors in?

Good point, Dafydd - there certainly seems to be a gap. Another trend we have noticed is that local media sites have failed to exploit the internet as well as national media providers. Maybe a tie of local news and local retail good be a winner?

Thanks, Robin