If you sell internationally, it’s definitely worth reading the technology section of the daily papers. For example, did you know that many websites, including Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, not to mention the all-important Google, are blocked in China?

That’s been the case for quite a while, but recent news stories have also alerted us to similar and less-predictable restrictions in Turkey and Pakistan. On the other hand, the Finnish government have apparently decreed that broadband Internet access is a human right, and are promising every citizen super-fast access by 2015. Currently, almost 100% of the population is already connected at a more normal speed.

Why is it worth knowing these things? Well, obviously, if you sell to Turkey, say, you won’t want to waste your efforts on a viral marketing campaign on YouTube. Similarly, there’s little point in optimising your Chinese web pages for Google. On the other hand, if many of your customers are from Scandinavia, you can have a lot of fun designing fairly weighty websites with as much video or Flash content as you like – it won’t clog up their capacious broadband.

Apart from anything else, it’s fascinating to see how each country restricts or enables access to the 20th century’s greatest invention – and your international strategy will be a whole lot more likely to bear fruit.

Sell online? Your customer base just increased by almost two million.

Well, all right, not “just”, but, according to The Guardian, Internet users rose by 5%, or 1.9 million, to 38.8 million over the last year to May. This boost in numbers reflects new sectors of the population becoming familiar with an online environment, with the largest rise coming in the 50-65 year old demographic.

Other growing sectors include females between the ages of 12 and 20, and a substantial rise in men of all ages.

So, if you sell products or services that appeal to these profiles, you may well be reaping the benefits. If you don’t… might now be the time to start? Having said that, it seems to us that these figures really just represent previously ill-represented sectors coming online. Eventually, the Internet will be so pervasive that to talk about who is on it will be meaningless: we all will be.