Malta Number 1 Internet User?

Malta is the most internet connected country in the world, according to 'unsourced statistics' from an internet monitoring and marketing company. New Zealand is second. From New Zealand's National Business Review:

A website called internetworldstats, which is one of a series of websites produced by Bogota, Columbia-based Miniwatts International, LLC, generated a flurry of stories this week by ranking 233 countries to show internet penetration by population and producing some unlikely results in the process. The Malta Independent, reporting from the homeland of the most connected place on the planet, noted the results with some surprise, but went on to list many of the rankings, noting that they showed Malta had "beat off competition from powerhouse countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and other industrialised nations." ..The problem is, the data behind these stories paint a picture of use in which almost every person in Malta and New Zealand over the age of ten is connected to the internet with a personal account.

Malta, with 301,000 internet users in a population of 384,594 edges New Zealand out with a user percentage of 78.3 per cent and a 2000-2005 growth rate of 652.5 per cent. Almost 18 per cent of the people in Malta are 14 or younger, by the way, and another 13.6 per cent are over 65 -- age groups not well known for deep internet penetration..Another among the problems with the data involved is that the active user base in any country is typically far below the number of people who could use an internet account to go online if they wanted to..

More, some of the numbers are wildly different to other datasets. ClickZ, a well-known provider of internet marketing intelligence, draws from NN and the Computer Industry Almanac, among other documented sources, for its estimates of the global internet population. According to its latest data set (November 2005), New Zealand has 2,340,000 internet users -- and Malta has 59,000. Those are considerable disparities -- but the oddest dispartity of all comes in the total number of internet users reckoned by internetworldstats. The Computer Industry Almanac -- for years taken as the most definitive source in a universe of conflicting numbers -- says there were 1.8 billion internet users in the world in 2005, while internetworldstats pegs the global figure at only half that, or 972,828,001. Go figure.