Twitter, the micro-blogging platform, has been in the news quite a bit lately (in particular for VC funding and rescuing a US blogger). This has helped drive US Internet visits up further to the increasingly popular service. Year on year, Internet visits to Twitter.com are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month.

A colleague forwarded me a fantastic article from Ad Age "It's Web 3.0, and Someone Else's Content is King". The article is worth a read for anyone in the content business. The author, Matthew Creamer, suggests that Web 3.0 will be about monetizing the web's openness and points to examples in the news business of websites aggregating other people's content for profit. Are content aggregators in fact growing in popularity? The author cites Michael Wolff of Newser: "The space is heating up". According to internet usage data, is it?

This morning I was interested to see the thread on Techmeme's homepage about the success so far of Yahoo! Buzz. The RedWriteWeb story provides statistics on traffic from Yahoo! Buzz to some of the publishers involved in the Beta. ReadWriteWeb claims that Yahoo! Buzz "spells trouble for Digg". What do the figures show?

Sports Illustrated has published its annual Swimsuit Issue. I noticed the website in my weekly fast movers report and thought it could make a fun post. When I looked at the data however, something struck me as really odd. The top search term sending visits to the Swimsuit Issue website was "si swimsuit issue". The term had a huge spike this year but was relatively flat for the past two years. I had expected it to spike for each annual issue. What did this year's issue include, I wondered, to cause such a frenzy online.

Yahoo! Search attracts a younger audience than Google. I promised a post with figures to back up my claim (sorry I am a day late - forgot it was Valentine's Day!). The following charts show the percentage of visits from each age group to Yahoo! Search and Google.com.

A colleague sent me an email about Mark Malkoff moving into Ikea while his NY apartment is fumigated. I checked Hitwise data and found a nice spike in traffic to the marklivesinikea.com website and in searches for "mark malkoff", with Thursday the biggest day for visits to the website. The stunt has no doubt been good for Mark's career. But what about Ikea. This is where things get interesting... Ikea is hosting their annual post-holiday sale and this stunt is likely cheaper than expensive TV ads.

It is rumored that Steve Jobs will announce a video rental service for iTunes in his much-anticipated MacWorld keynote on Tuesday. Adding fuel to the fire of speculation, Netflix has preempted Apple's announcement saying it will offer unlimited access to its streaming video library to most customers. To lend context to the announcements, I wanted to profile Netflix and Blockbuster, the two biggest players in online movie rental.

This week's launch of Wikia Search is the latest example of a human powered search engine. Mahalo and Cha-Cha are two other recent entrants. This week we've seen a spike in daily visits to Wikia Search, as you'd expect. In my digging the thing that stood as interesting to me is Mahalo's growth. The following chart shows the weekly share of US Internet visits to Mahalo and Cha-Cha over the past six months.

Guitar Hero 3 launched 28th October and has since garnered $115 million for Activision whose chairman today revealed that Activision has shipped more of the Guitar Hero 3 game than any other in its history. In short order Guitar Hero 3 became the most searched for video game based on share of US Internet searches.

I noticed a few weeks ago that US Internet searches for "itunes" had overtaken searches for "free music downloads". As you can see from the following chart, the share of US Internet searches for "free music downloads" and "itunes" follow a similar pattern. Over the holidays searches for "itunes" and "free music downloads" spike as consumers look to fill their new iPods with new music.

According to Stephen McGill, head of gambling and entertainment for Xbox UK, the "Xbox 360 is uniquely placed to take the UK by storm this Christmas". After yesterday's announcement of a price cut for the gaming console, we thought it high time to update our statistics on searches for gaming consoles.

Amazon.co.uk is the second most visited retail website after eBay UK based on UK internet visits and ranks #15 overall, just behind BBC.co.uk and ahead of YouTube. We're all familiar with the retail giant, but from where does Amazon get its traffic? I wanted to share and elaborate on the stats from our recent Technology Guardian column.

Last week a colleague pointed out that the share of UK internet searches for "facebook" were tied with those for "myspace". This week, Facebook continued to climb and so overtook MySpace. This means that the volume of UK searches for "facebook" were higher last week than for MySpace. Facebook continues to trail MySpace in visits. Last week, MySpace was 41% larger in share of UK internet visits than Facebook.

Last week, Widgets that embed content into profiles in social networks are causing a stir in the UK rankings of Photography websites. Our Site Seeing column in this week's Technology Guardian (sorry still not available online so I can't provide a link) is about Slide.com, the photo sharing website which two weeks ago overtook Flickr to take the #2 position among Photography websites. (Last week, it dropped back down to #3). Rock You ranked #4.

Today, Hitwise is issuing a news release about the growth of the Entertainment category. In doing our research, we noticed that YouTube looks set to overtake BBC.co.uk in share of UK visits within a matter of weeks.

I realise it is risky to refer to those aged 55+ as "silver surfers" but it strikes me as a better term than "cotton tops" my parents' favoured label. In any case, it seems that those aged 55+, so-called silver surfers, are set to overtake 35-44 year olds as the demographic age group representing the largest share of UK Internet visits.