When is a year not a year?
Howard Lake | 29 April 1998 | News
When it is an Internet year! If you find it difficult to keep up with Internet developments, you are not alone. Internet workers have been talking of Internet years and comparing them with dog years for some time, as a means of indicating how quickly the Internet is developing and changing. The phraseology is not so daft as it might seem now, with the release of the US government’s first report into the evolution of the Internet.
It took radio 38 years to gather 50 million users in the US and 13 years for TV to acquire the same number of viewers. The Internet took just four years to do so. Internet usage is now doubling every 100 days, according to the US Department of Commerce (will it be renamed Department of e-Commerce?).
One serious impact of this speed of development on charities is that the old idea of having 5-year plans is most unlikely to allow an organisation the flixbility to cope with the opportunities and threats that the Internet offers.
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.