Excerpt of e-mail from R. I. Feigenblatt to former
Mayor Jason Jarrell Sun, 22 Jan 2006 04:24:25 -

Hello Mr. Mayor,

...I would like to raise the issue of who would be likely
to make use of the [City of Buchanan] Web site. The
majority of homes in Georgia now include at least one
person who accesses the Internet from home, according
to a study by the US Census Bureau in recent years.
Obviously, the fraction is not the same in every
community and region in Georgia, but the variation
is much less than you might imagine. Consider this
excerpt from e-mail I wrote earlier this year:

	Last year I had a chance to look over the data from LONG ago
	(October 1997) and get the ACTUAL numbers for Georgia, broken
	down by county. Not EVERY Georgia county was surveyed, but all
	five affluent central "Atlanta" counties (Cobb, Fulton, Clayton,
	DeKalb and Gwinette) were, as well as multiple other counties.
	Here are the results I totalled up:

	Use of PCs and Internet in Georgia homes in October 1997
                             5 Atlanta        other           all of
                             counties        counties         Georgia
	No PC at home           54.7%           63.0%           60.0%
	PC but not Internet     13.2%           17.6%           16.0%
	PC with Internet access 32.2%           19.4%           23.9%
	                        =====           =====           =====
	Total                   100%            100%            100%
	Actual home #s asked    737             1353            2090

	October 2003 was the last time the CPS asked about Internet use.
	Here are the estimated results for the households in Georgia:

	Number of households:			3,403,201
	Households with 1+ persons who
		use the Internet from home	1,829,070
	Households with NO persons who
		use the Internet from home	1,574,131

	Today, a SOLID MAJORITY of Georgia households contain
	at least one person who uses the Internet from HOME. Of the
	"using" households, about 2/3 have "dial-up" (telephone line)
	Internet access. The others have fast "broadband" access
	- like ADSL and cable modems.

I don't know what the numbers today are for Haralson County, much
less Buchanan. But I will remind you that already THREE years ago
(November 11, 2002) BellSouth's Georgia chief, Phil Jacobs, said
that 36 customers used the Buchanan "wire center" for ADSL service.
This includes people not only in Buchanan per se, but folks up to
18,000 "wire feet" (not "crow-flying" feet) from the BellSouth
building in Buchanan...

Finally, bear in mind that having a city Web site provides
virtual "printing presses" for the city anywhere one can find
an Internet-connected device like a PC attached to a printer.
For example, people can walk into the public library and ask the
librarian to machine-search the city Web site for some issue
of interest to them - and then walk away with a printed copy
of the germane material for 15 cents per page. They don't need
to know ANYTHING about computers - only that the library can
help them in a matter such as posited...

Best wishes for a successful administration!
Ron

P.S. Here are the numbers of (A)DSL accounts Phil Jacobs
enumerated [in Nov. 2002] for 9 wire centers in our area:
        Bowdon:          96
        Carrollton:     599
        Temple:          56
        Villa Rica:     181
        Roopville:       14
        Bremen:         200
        Buchanan:        36
        Tallapoosa:      75
        Franklin:        17

Note that the total for the three Haralson wire centers
was 200+36+75 = 311 subscribers, compared to roughly 10,000
housholds. In this nation, households outnumber businesses
by a huge margin in DSL use. So one might say that already
[in Nov. 2002], about 3% of the homes in our county subscribed
to DSL service.

Note added April 2008:

USA use of the Internet is closely and frequently studied by the The Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Of particular interest to casual readers is the page devoted to latest trends. As of this writing (April 2008) the following fractions of adult Americans are Internet users:

Either gender:  75%
Women           74%
Men             76%

HH inc. $75K+:  93%
College deg.+:  93%
Ages 18-29:     92%
Urban/suburban: 77%
Non-Hisp white: 76%

Rural:          64%
HH inc. $30K-:  61%
Non-Hisp black: 56%
Not HS grad:    38%
Age 65+:        37%