Happy Holidays everyone!

Like much of the world, we here at Pingdom will be taking a short Christmas break. Since we won’t be updating the blog until sometime next week, here is a selection of posts from the past year that you might have missed.

Enjoy!

Internet and the Web in general

• The top 20 countries on the Internet, and what the future might bring
• State of the Internet in Europe
• The incredible growth of the Internet since 2000
• The REAL connection speeds for Internet users across the world
• Is the Web heading toward redirect hell?
• What it takes to be a top 100 website
• Amazing facts and figures about Instant Messaging (infographic)
• Facebook as a single point of failure for the Web
• 15 fantastic firsts on the Internet
• Everything there is to know about domain names (infographic)

Open source

• The consistent failure of Linux to grab even 1% of the desktop OS market
• The 9 most important events in Open Source history
• How Facebook, Twitter and other big sites give back to Open Source

Web tech

• Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site
• jQuery’s triumphant march to success
• The modern browser wars: How well Firefox, IE and Chrome succeed in getting their users to upgrade
• Is Goo.gl really the fastest URL shortener?
• Nginx, the little Russian web server taking on the giants

Mobile

• Mobile OS usage splits the world
• Why Android developers are losing money, and it’s not due to piracy

Big business

• Google facts and figures (massive infographic)
• The money made by Microsoft, Apple and Google, 1985 until today
• How Google dominates the Web
• Innovation by acquisition
• Our desktops are ruled by dinosaurs
• How Google collects data about you and the Internet

Social media

• The top countries on Facebook
• Study: Ages of social network users
• Facebook, social media juggernaut (infographic)

History

• Amazing facts and figures about the evolution of hard disk drives

We hope you found these posts interesting, fun or maybe even educational. Thank you for reading!

Perceptions matter, and the perception of Nokia in the news, on the web, and in the minds of many, is that things aren’t going that well. Even in the Pingdom office, we hear “Nokia is doomed,” but do the numbers support this belief?

Looking at the statistics, Symbian leads the mobile operating system race with just over 30% of web browsing traffic. That’s down slightly from late last year, when we noted that Symbian finished 2011 as the top mobile operating system, with almost 34% of the mobile OS market.

What is even more interesting, however, is that Nokia is also ahead when we look at figures for all the mobile handset vendors. In fact, Nokia is way ahead of Apple, and Android lags far behind.

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Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we talk mainly about Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Some fresh research shows an increase in smaller, more targeted DDoS attacks, and hacker group Anonymous has vowed to take down the Internet by launching a DDoS attack on the 13 root DNS servers.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on OpenStack.

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By some measures, more than 7 billion people now inhabit the world, and more than a third of us are on the Internet. But how many are added each day, each week, or each minute? We think we have a pretty good idea.

Read on for some pretty amazing numbers.

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Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we can finally talk about Saleh’s Carbon for Windows Phone app being available in Windows Marketplace. We also talk to Rich Brueckner of InsideHPC.com about the world of supercomputers.

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