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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (76373)	2/22/2000 9:01:00 AM
From: Les H	Respond to of 132070

Online time soars at office Not all surfing work-related By Greg Farrell, USA TODAY usatoday.com Productivity may be skyrocketing in the workplace, but so is Web surfing. In its first major study of Internet usage in the workplace, Nielsen/Net Ratings finds that people spend more than twice as much time online at the office as they do at home. Although many of the most-visited sites at the office deliver news and financial information, the study finds, some decidedly non-work sites -- from eBay to RootsWeb to MyFamily.com -- take up a big chunk of the workday. "You can't characterize the people doing this as goof-offs," said Allen Weiner, vice president of analytical services at Net Ratings. "People would perform the same stuff at work using other methods. The Internet has just given them a more effective way of doing it." Highlights from the survey of Internet usage for the month of January, based on a sample of 6,500 workers at small, medium and large companies: Workers spend an average of 21 hours online vs. an average of 9.5 hours at home. Web users at the office take advantage of high-speed connections to access broadband entertainment sites such as Broadcast.com and MP3 more frequently than at home. Working and ogling don't mix. Visits to adult sites on office time occur at half the rate they do at home. Surfers access news, information and finance sites much more frequently during the workday than at night so that they can keep up with breaking news or the markets. Online shopping is dominated by Amazon.com and eBay both at home and at the office. But office-shopping sites such as CDW.com, Staples.com and OfficeMax.com are much more popular at work than at home. The total audience of workers with access to the Internet, according to Net Ratings, is 32.7 million. The total with home Internet access is 122.7 million, of which 77 million are active users. Only 5.7 million workers visit eBay, compared with 21.5 million for the most-visited site, Yahoo. But eBay visitors stay at the auction site the longest, almost three hours. Media Metrix, another Web audience measurement company, has been publishing home and office traffic numbers since 1997, based on random phone calls.