Akamai has a Real-time Web Monitor tracking “global Internet conditions around the clock.” Areas w/ highest traffic are brightest. You can also color the map by areas with the slowest connections (latency) or the most recent “network attacks.”

An Ars Technica article compiles the latest illegal music download research in “A $13 billion fantasy: latest music piracy study overstates effect of P2P.” These studies conclusively show P2P sharing nets cost the industry somewhere between $0 and $13B ($US) yearly. Doncha just love research?

Researchers at Jacobs Univerity at the University of Technology- Berlin have published a International Podcastersurvey (pdf) of 1000+ podcasters, with results such as:

Quantify motivations
• Podcasting is not mainly a techies‘ affair
• It‘s more about identity and relationship management
• But most of all, it‘s about information and expression of opinion

Polls of Presidential voters are remarkably accurate. The day before the 2000 Iowa Democratic Primary, the MSM News folk were still reporting Dean as the frontrunner he’d been for months, despite the several polls that showed a last-minute turn towards Kerry. The news was wrong, the polls right; Kerry won.

Then in November the Voter News Service was criticized for picking Al Gore the winner of the 2000 election. But it turned out (years later) Gore did win. Again, the polls proved correct, even when the margins were so slim.

Most media folk, including myself, are notoriously pitiful at prognostication (hell, we’re not even any good at evaluating the present), so you really shouldn’t pay us any mind when we mindlessly try to predict wuz gonna happen. But do pay attention to those polls we pay for, cuz when several say the same thing, it’s likely an accurate reflection of reality.

All a long way of saying, check: RealClearPolitics - Polls. It’s an up-to-date listing of the major Election 2008 polls, averaged and listed individually. Then click their National Head-to-Head Polls and see who’d beat who if the prez were picked today. (Answer: Hillary’s kickin’ ass.)

From USA Today “U.S. Net access not all that speedy:”

Median US broadband: 1.97 MB/s (Montana: 1.312)
Japan: 61 MB/s
France: 17 MB/s
Canada: 7 MB/s

Hey — at least we’re not in SoDak (0.825)!

What we thot was a radio series turns out to be a research project: This American Life Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence.

Says senior producer Julie Snyder: “There is not a single existential crisis or self-congratulatory epiphany that has been or could be experienced by a left-leaning agnostic that we have not exhaustively documented and grouped by theme.”

So, where’s that leave pubradio when it’s hippest hour is now Onion fodder?

Newsflash!!! Hold the presses. This just in: we now have incontrovertible evidence that Republicans approve of our Prez, Democrats don’t, and Independents aren’t sure. It took the resources of both Slate Magazine and researchers MediaCurves to divine this world-shaking new data; ie, here’s how researchers spend their and their focus group members’ time: