BBC News has created an interactive "map" of the Top 100 Most-Visited sites on the Internet for January 2010. The data, according to the BBC, was collected by the Nielsen company and covers "the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, US and Australia. The figures represent unique users for the month of January 2010." Just mouse-over the blocks on the image at the BBC site to get information on each web resource.

According to this data, consider that 7.35% of all unique visitors to the Internet last month used Google. That's almost 350,000,000 people. And that's unique visitors, i.e., not counting "repeat" customers. Over 150,000,000 used Wikipedia. Over 52,000,000 used About. Over 37,000,000 used IMDb. Over 28,000,000 used WikiAnswers.

This kind of information has implications for KnowItNow24x7 service: People are already using these sites. Chances are, when people come to KIN24x7, they've already been to Google, Wikipedia, and About, just to name a few. Librarians have two primary opportunities when serving patrons on the service. The first is to show them how to better utilize online tools they're already using, e.g., how to narrow a Google search or how to evaluate Wikipedia's resources. The second is to dig deeper on the Web or to provide information from subscription databases, both of which have the ability to give patrons a more comprehensive view of "what's out there."

An announcement for the BBC News piece was originally posted at the Librarian in Black blog.