Britons love ‘wilfing’
p2pnet.net OT news:- Are you a ‘wilfer’? No Way! But if you live in the UK, you might be.
It’s “surfing the web without any real purpose” and a lot of Britons seem to be spending a lot of time doing it, according to a new survey.
“Although a newly-identified habit, more than two-thirds of the 33.7 million internet users in the UK admit to at least the occasional “wilf” (a term derived from the phrase “what was I looking for?”), while browsing the internet, says The Guardian, quoting a study by YouGo commissioned by Moneysupermarket.com.
Almost a quarter of 2,400 people included said they spent 30% or more of their internet time wilfing, or, they spent the equivalent of one whole day every two weeks, “pointlessly jumping between random pages”.
The poll suggests that although people often log on, “with a specific purpose, they’re experiencing so many online distractions that, “many forget what they were looking for,” says the BBC.
And the leading wilfers are Scots, 63% of whom admitted to being distracted ‘all or some of the time’ when online for work or study reasons, it says,.
What kind of sites are nost likely to encourafe people to wilf? Shopping, news and travel.
Also See:
The Guardian – Wilfing on the web, the new British pastime, April 10, 2007
BBC – Scots come tops for web ‘Wilfing’, April 10, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the end (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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April 11th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
If my “wilf” you mean “goofing off,” then I spend at least 80% of my Internet time, or about 1.5-3 hours a day, doing it.
Curse you, Internet. Now I can never get my work done.