My wife has asked me to pull together a brief history of certain events in the history of the web for a presentation for her PR course she has tomorrow morning and I thought there might be some brains on here who might know.

Whilst it's easy to find stuff like launch of Mosaic, Netscape or any 'technical' advances in the internet, I'm struggling to find the following info:

First major online news site launched in UK with launch date

Rate of takeup of internet connections in UK business and consumers

Date amazon launched (sometime in 97 from what I can find)

Thanks for any help you guys can offer, I'm feeling a bit google'd out...

Phil

Amazon US was launched in July 1995. Amazon UK was something called Bookpages originally but got bought by Amazon in early 1998.

Thanks for that info - very useful.

I've also just been asked how many weblogs are currently available.

Can't find much stats after 2001 estimating 60,000 and it must be much more that that now.

Cheers

Phil

This any good?

http://www.chinwag.com/uk-netmarketing/archive/archive-dec-1999/msg00239.shtml

Gareth

Great link - thanks Gareth. I think we've got most things covered now, so I can get some rest.

Thanks for your input guys...

Phil

Whoaaa there!! I've just read it (duh) and critically:

This special supplement brings you an exclusive preview of data with particular interest to the online consumer retail market.

Damn!!! I'll keep looking...

Gareth

Hmm good point, didn't read that bit!

I've found some more recent stats on mori.com which take us to May 2003, but now I can't even ping their website!

Although it's just been decided that internet penetration stats wont be included thanks for pointing it out...

Phil