User Demographics: Google vs. Yahoo

Hitwise ran an interesting article yesterday about the difference in demographic between users of Yahoo and Google. They analysed a range of statistics, and their results indicated a couple of interesting points – firstly that Google users tend to skew slightly older (centering around 35-44 rather than Yahoo’s 25-34), and secondly that Google tends to be favoured by people who have spent over $500 online. In principle what this means is if you have a cheap product advertise on Yahoo, a more expensive product then advertise on Google to get better results.

You can read the whole article here.

Through a (Wiki)Scanner Darkly

A recent study of IP addresses of people who edited wikipedia entries seems to indicate the CIA, Democratic Party and even the Vatican have made edits. Obviously since this survey is only based on IP address there is a high potential for fraud, but it’s interesting that people are starting to look at this open information in this way. There are already a slew of services for public figures and corporations to review their web presence, but I’d expect to see more of these ‘open source’ efforts allowing anyone to see who’s changing what.