Companies are always trying to pass off deceiving statements or misleading data, and we pride ourselves on being suspicious types.  January AOL numbers have been presented by Frank Gruber, however, and they look pretty good in terms of both believability and AOL’s performance.

Once upon a time, few outside of the scientific community knew of the World Wide Web, not to mention email or newsgroups. Internet usage continues to rise dramatically since the advent of the Web.

Forrester has some great statistics related to the holiday season for online retailers:

I’ve never had a serious grudge against eBay or complaint about its site.  Nonetheless, it’s been months since I’ve visited an online auction for personal reasons, and eBay is trying hard to reverse this sort of behavior.

If a social network user is dedicated enough to use two social networks concurrently, it might not be all that surprising that those same networkers spend, on average, more time at both sites. Networkers are networkers after all.

I heard about this story from Glen yesterday about his extensive research into the correlation between the Technorati 100 and Digg home page stories.

Friday is the end of the workweek.  The day should move along quickly, smoothly, and without any surprises.  In that spirit, then, we bring you the results of the latest Nielsen//NetRatings search share rankings: in May of 2007, Google was still on top.

Leuksman.com published some revealing statistics on Wikimedia traffic.

Bango this week published statistics that confirm that the United States is at the forefront of a mobile web growth with a three-fold increase in usage over the last year. This rapid rise, taking the US to second position behind the UK, is being fuelled by the increasing popularity of mobile search as a way of finding new content and services.

At Social Media Systems we’ve been discussing how to build out a healthy blogroll, both to aid our visitors, provide valuable content, and to enhance our social media marketing campaigns.

Alright, Twitter has suddenly attained the status of a notoriously popular Application. After being fueled by SXSW, everybody else is talking about Twitter including those who don’t even have a blog. Talks in the Blogosphere have spit out stats that Twitter got 1 million messages sent recently. Finally after about a year of its launch, Twitter has won.

On the whole, Google’s search properties are doing well – a recent analysis showed a 24% year-over-year improvement. There’s a lot of variation among those properties, however. Google Video was the clear winner, with a gain of 545%, but Froogle, Google Alerts, and Google Local all suffered losses.

An interesting, albeit controversial, set of statistics was provided by Compete.com last week outlining the top 20 online properties that a pool of 2,000,000 people spent the most time on in December 2006.