Who's out there?
No, we're not talking about aliens. We're talking about the Internet.
The faces behind the blizzard of electrons that swirl through the Web are almost as mysterious as martians. Now, some folks are trying to make contact.
Most of the information we hear about the Information Superhighway is suspect. Some say 40 million people are online. Others say 60 million - or is it 20 million?
But if you talk to people on the street, many are as clueless as the guy on the Fuse.Net commercial, trying to find the bus to the Internet.
Internet demographics are vital to those companies trying to turn the Internet into a commercial and recreational mall, the virtual town square of the next century.
One such firm is SharkBytes, a Cincinnati Web site developer (http://www.sharkbytes.com). This six-person firm has been toiling in the not-so-fertile fields of the World Wide Web for almost three years.
SharkBytes has come up with some clever ways to ''grow'' the Internet as a commercial medium - such as a local barter system for ads - but the underlying question remains: Who's out there to see those ads?
To find out, the company has started ''The First Greater Cincinnati Internet Survey'' (http://web-cincinnati.com/firstsurvey), a non-scientific sampling of who's surfing Web sites in the Queen City.
''We launched the survey out of frustration,'' said Amy Acosta, Web architect at SharkBytes. ''We're trying to get an idea of the character of people on the Web (in Cincinnati) and how that compares to national statistics.''
Log your response
The survey really isn't scientific because it's ''self-selecting,'' meaning only those who happen upon the Web page take the survey - and could take the survey several times. (A scientific survey would randomly sample hundreds of homes in the Cincinnati area to see if and how they access the Internet.)
The local survey asks for a ZIP code to keep the data local. And to make sure a prankster doesn't skew the results by submitting dozens of bogus surveys, it asks for an e-mail address that it verifies, Ms. Acosta said.
'We've gotten close to 1,000 responses'' so far, said Ryan Walker, SharkBytes president.
Professional pollsters might scoff at such surveys, but that doesn't mean they're inaccurate. Most attempts to quantify activity on the Web have been done this way.
The largest and probably most respected surveys of Web usage have been done at Georgia Tech's College of Computing (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-04-1996).
The five surveys, conducted between January 1994 and April 1996, have recorded a Web that's growing in both numbers and diversity of users.
For example, the fifth survey (11,700 responses) showed that the average Web surfer is 33 years old (a steady increase from the first survey), and women respondents increased to 31 percent. Average household income was $59,000 and has been dropping, indicating that the Web is increasingly becoming a middle-class phenomenon.
Most just browse
What are people doing online? Almost 80 percent said they were ''simply browsing,'' while almost 65 percent use the Web for entertainment and 51 percent for work (respondents could check more than one activity.) The number who use the Web for shopping increased from 11 percent to 14 percent between the fourth and fifth surveys.
In the fifth survey, almost 81 percent of users had complaints about speed and about a third complained that they frequently got lost or couldn't find the information they wanted. Only 9 percent complained about the cost of accessing the Internet. More than one in three respondents access the Web at 28.8 kbps.
More than half surf the Internet from home, and more than a third say they choose the Web over television daily. But Web surfers still like things free: 65 percent said they would not pay to gain entrance to Web sites. Those who said they were willing to pay were almost evenly divided between those willing to pay a subscription fee (12 percent) and pay-per-view (11 percent).
Nielsen Media Research conducted a more ambitious, scientific survey in August-September 1995 with follow-up interviews in March-April 1996. That survey (http://www.nielsenmedia.com/commercenet/exec.html) found that Internet usage was growing significantly, new users come from more diverse backgrounds than long-time users, and commercial use of the Internet was increasing.
''The First Greater Cincinnati Internet Survey'' will collect information during August and September and post the results in October.
Charles Brewer can be sent e-mail at cbrewer@enquirer.com.