Gulltaggen, “The Nordic Premier Digital Marketing Conference,” kicks off today in Norway. It’s an annual awards ceremony, which aims to “stimulate and reward the heroes in digital creativity.”

This year’s Gulltaggen is headlined by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, so it’s clearly quite a show. Of course this caught our attention so we set out to take a look the websites run by the producers of the projects that are up for an award at this year’s Gulltaggen.

We found some interesting things indeed.

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In this report we will examine the current status of what is often referred to as the “Browser Wars.” How popular are the various web browsers around the world right now? As you’ll see, there are significant regional differences in web browser usage.

We’ve done this on two levels. First, a quick overview, and below that we’ve gone into more detail about the current web browser usage in each world region, as well as the overall usage in the world. Plenty of charts, we promise!

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We continue our series of interviews about web performance by talking to Arvind Jain, Engineering Director at Google.

His career started out at Microsoft, where he worked as a software engineer, then continued at Akamai and Riverbed, before he joined Google. At Google, Arvind is responsible for making Google products faster and he runs the “Make the web faster” initiative.

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This week we thought you would be interested in reading about what’s happening with the worldwide adoption of IPv6, working up to the World IPv6 Launch Day on June 6.

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This year the number of Internet users worldwide reached 2.27 billion, almost exactly twice what it was in 5 years ago, 1.15 billion. We all know the Internet is big, but this kind of growth really puts things into perspective.

The Internet population has been swelling rapidly since the arrival of the World Wide Web (which rests firmly on top of the foundation provided by the Internet). It’s human nature to get used to changes, so most of us have a tendency to forget how rapidly the world has changed, and keeps changing.

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Flash usage is declining, and to be perfectly honest, that isn’t a bad thing. At least not in the name of performance and responsiveness on our dear old World Wide Web.

We thought this chart was pretty telling, courtesy of HTTP Archive.

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In this show, we talk to Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services at help AG, about security.

We continue on the topic of the Flashback Mac trojan, which has now been reduced to affecting about 140,000 Macs, but its reach has surpassed the Confickr botnet, at least in relative terms. We also touch upon the need for IT security education within organizations, and new Android malware.

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Did you look at your website on the new iPad yet? We have browsed quite a few sites already on that gorgeous 2048 by 1536 pixel display, and we can categorically state that the future has arrived.

But whether that future is all bright remains to be seen.

Early signs seem to indicate that we’ll have to endure more bloat, with the possibility that the average size of a web page balloons to almost 5 MB from the 1.1 MB average today.

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Most of you probably noticed that Gmail experienced some downtime yesterday. If you missed it, you had probably retired to your Batcave.

Google was presenting up to 10% of Gmail users with a 500 error, leaving scores of people hanging, in some cases unable to work on necessary tasks.

There were some really funny tweets about the outage. And of course we at Pingdom love humor and this has to be one of the most hilarious ones.

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Lately, the web has been abuzz with Instagram’s billion-dollar sale to Facebook. This is an enormous amount of money for a service that is less than two years old. Instagold, so to speak.

This made us think. As you know, there have been a fair amount of high-profile deals like this ever since the initial dot-com boom back around 1998-1999. When it comes to time invested versus the sales price, how well does the Instagram acquisition stack up? It should be pretty high up there, but let’s compare it with a number of other tech acquisitions to get some facts on the table.

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