• Of all U.S. Internet users, what percentage will be carrying an iPad two or three years from now? (Note I said carrying, not merely owning.)
• Of all mobile phone users in the world, what percentage have an iPhone today?
• What do people under age 30 use the mobile Internet for, most of the time? And how will that change in two or three years?

So far, I’m not planning to buy an iPad, because I don’t envision myself carrying it around. I can’t leave my mobile phone (an iPhone, in fact) at home. In cases when I want to have more Internet with me than the phone makes convenient, usually I will also need to do a fair amount of writing. For anything more than e-mails and Twitter, I want a physical keyboard. (Yes, I’m sure I could plug a keyboard into the iPad. But then that’s two pieces instead of one.)

I’m talking about both away-from-home travel and day-to-day activities. Like most Americans, I do not commute to the office on a bus or train, so that’s not reading or Web-browsing time for me. I fly often, and I carry printed reading material for takeoff and landing. When electronic devices are permitted, most of the time I need to be typing (the keyboard again). Of course, I also listen to music.

As for the iPhone, I use it all day long for e-mail and Twitter, except when I’m physically in front of a computer. When I travel, I depend on Google Maps for city navigation, TripIt for flight updates, and Yelp for finding restaurants. My news and information uses of the mobile Internet are driven almost entirely by Twitter (for news) and Google (for looking things up). I use weather and foreign currency information frequently (apps).

I’m not claiming that I am the typical user of the mobile Internet. (For one thing, I hardly ever look at Facebook.) Teens and young adults spend a huge amount of time on social networking sites, as we all know, but they are mostly unimpressed by Twitter (see the Pew research from February 2010). Their needs and interests are different from mine.

Our survey of teens also tracked some core internet activities by those ages 12-17 and found:

• 62% of online teens get news about current events and politics online.
• 48% of wired teens have bought things online like books, clothing or music, up from 31% who had done so in 2000 when we first asked about this.
• 31% of online teens get health, dieting or physical fitness information from the internet. And 17% of online teens report they use the internet to gather information about health topics that are hard to discuss with others such as drug use and sexual health topics.

Source: Pew Research

Being in a university environment, I’ve observed that the number of students carrying laptop computers has increased to a very large degree in the past two to three years. Now we see them everywhere. It’s not unusual to see a table of six kids in the food court with six laptops open on the table.

Tiny netbooks are noticeable but far from dominant. Apple MacBooks are quite common, but probably not up to 50 percent (yet).

Students need to write. They need to complete assignments. So their reliance on laptop computers is hardly surprising. But think about this: They are also developing a habit, carrying the computer everywhere, flipping it open whenever they have a spare minute, connecting to the campus wi-fi.

How will this habit evolve when they leave the university?

People who are tied to a desk at work have one set of habits. Business road warriors, spending hundreds of hours in airports, have a different set of habits. Young people have different habits in part because they are young and have a particular set of social relationships — but they are also students, whether in high school or college.

When they stop being students, will they carry any device other than the phone?

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote about it on Wednesday, and he has a nice screenshot in the post to show you what it looked like then. Flickr and Wikipedia also provided frequent updates from the ground. Arrington didn’t mention Global Voices, which put together a good package on the attacks based largely on blogs. The Big Picture has the best news photos.

The example of Mumbai reinforces a few things I am always telling journalists about our online future:

1. Breaking news will be online before it’s on television.
2. Breaking news — especially disasters and attacks in the middle of a city — will be covered first by non-journalists.
3. The non-journalists will continue providing new information even after the trained journalists arrive on the scene.
4. Cell phones will be the primary reporting tool at first, and possibly for hours.
5. Cell phones that can use a wireless Internet connection in addition to a cellular phone network are a more versatile reporting tool than a phone alone.
6. Still photos, transmitted by citizens on the ground, will tell more than most videos.
7. The right video will get so many views, your servers might crash (I’m not aware of this happening with any videos from Mumbai).
8. Live streaming video becomes a user magnet during a crisis. (CNN.com Live: 1.4 million views as of 11:30 a.m. EST today, according to Beet.tv.)
9. Your print reporters need to know how to dictate over the phone. If they can get a line to the newsroom, it might be necessary.
10. Your Web team must be prepared for this kind of crisis reporting.

In addition, we might discuss whether the mainstream media are superfluous in these situations — or can they perform a useful service to the public by sifting and filtering the incoming reports from the center of the events?

Previous post about the One Laptop Per Child program here. Buy two, give one, and you get a $200 tax deduction (U.S. residents).

Anyone with a laptop computer equipped for wireless access will be able to connect to the Internet from virtually anywhere in the city with the purchase of a $21-per-month account. The wireless connection will be free in two dozen designated zones …

EarthLink also will provide discounted accounts of $9.95 per month to 2,700 low-income city residents…. the city hopes to find interested residents by partnering with community agencies that already work with low-income residents.

The city council of Alexandria, Virginia, approved a proposal to allow EarthLink to “construct and maintain the network at no cost to the city.” The plan is expected to win final approval later this month.

Building the network will be relatively easy: About 500 devices the size of breadboxes will be installed, mostly on street lights, but also on traffic signals, poles and roofs.

“They’re very unobtrusive,” [Craig T. Fifer, Alexandria's e-government manager] said. “Most people won’t even notice the construction.”

EarthLink is hoping to recover its $2.7 million capital investment and to make money by selling accounts.

This sounds fantastic to me, but I have to wonder if the city has any protection against EarthLink hiking up the prices as soon as the residents of Alexandria get comfortable with their city-wide wireless access.

That’s what happened with cable television in the U.S. — monopoly service providers, grossly inflated pricing, no public access channels, and finally, lousy service.

Source: “No Wires, No Plugs: Just Access by WiFi,” by Jerry Markon, The Washington Post, Dec. 7, 2006, p. VA03

Technorati tags: wifi | wi-fi | community | wireless | access

As described by PaidContent (found by way of Journerdism) the idea is that The Pilot will give free wireless Internet access to all of Moore County, North Carolina, and also offer (separately) a pay package of WiMax.

What’s totally brilliant about this is that every free wi-fi network I have used automatically takes you to its own Web page as soon as you try to connect. ITS OWN WEB PAGE. As in, the home page of the newspaper! Or better yet — I think this would be much better — a very bare-bones Google-like page with no more than six headlines, one great photo, and EXACTLY ONE very high-priced clickable ad that does not animate, move, leave cookies, or do any other stupid or offensive ad tricks.

Would that be awesome? Everybody in your whole community would see your page EVERY TIME they logged in! The ad spot — if you do it right, without the garbage, and make it a single spot, no competition — could pay for the whole operation after the first few months.

Of course, most corporate types would go in and completely screw it up the first day, by making the page bloated and impossible to use — just like 95 percent of the newspaper site home pages in the U.S. today. But in my dream of the perfect way to finally guarantee an income for your online site — by giving away free wireless AND using an intelligently designed (fast loading) TEASER page to attract people to your other stuff — in my dream, this would be foolproof.

This idea is so incredibly perfect, I can hardly believe no one else thought of it before the folks at The Pilot. They have my undying admiration as of today.

UPDATE (4:41 p.m.) — Here’s the story from The Pilot itself. More details there.

CORRECTION (July 7): Moore County, not Monroe County.

Technorati tags: newspapers | journalism | community | wifi | wireless | access