The Real Lower Peninsula

By virtue of the fact that Michigan juts out into the midst of the Great Lakes, we are a state known as a peninsula. The word "peninsula" is a Latin portmanteau, or a combination of two words. Paene, meaning "almost," and insula, meaning "island." Michigan actually has *two* peninsulas ... the Upper Peninsula (or "Da U.P., eh?") and the Lower Peninsula, wherein I reside.

But anyone with half a brain looking at a map of the United States would clearly see that the real lower peninsula of this country is, in fact, Florida.

And that's where I'm headed for the next couple of weeks. Yes, it's another road trip with Dad. This time to see friends, family, and basically just bum around somewhere warm that didn't just have half a foot of snow dumped on it. By virtue of my postal retirement, I'm available, I'm ready, and I'm willing; a good combination.

So look for the next few blog posts to be about the road trip, and yes, I'll try and upload a picture or two. For now, however, here are some facts about Internet use in 2012, gathered from Royal Pingdom.

THE INTERNET, CIRCA 2012

• 144 billion e-mails were sent every day.
• Of these, 61% were considered to be "non-essential."
• Google's G-Mail is the #1 e-mail program, with 425 million users.
• Just over 50% of all spam was about pharmaceuticals.
• There were 634 million websites.
• 51 million of these were new last year.
• 48% of the Top 100 blogs are on WordPress. (This blog uses Google's Blogger.)
• Google is the #1 web property in the United States, with 191 million visitors.
• There were 100 million ".com" domains at the end of the year.
• At just over 32%, GoDaddy is the largest domain name registrar in the world.
• There were 2.4 billion Internet users in 2012.
• Almost half of that number are in Asian countries.

• The U.S. has the greatest access to the Internet (see chart).
• Brazil is the most active country on Facebook.
• 47% of Facebook users are female.
• There were 300 million new photos added to Facebook every day.
• Facebook - started for the college crowd - now has an average user age of 40.5 years.
• Twitter has 200 million active users.
• There were an average of 175 million "tweets" sent every day in 2012.
• Google's Chrome is now the #1 web browser in use.
• There were 5.3 billion cell phones in use last year.
• 1.3 billion of those are smartphones.

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Mark's Musings is published on a periodical basis - right now on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays - but that may change without notice. Find me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/baldmark. This blog is considered to be a digital periodical publication and is filed as such with the U.S. Library of Congress; ISSN 2154-9761.