Deciding exactly which countries/entities to list above was no easy task. crenz gets ownership of the poll for doing much of the initial work.

Unfortunately, there were a few items in his list that I felt might be controversial to some so I had to do some research to decide exactly what got to be listed.

In the end, I found a recent survey of internet traffic per country, sorted the list, then ran down it to an arbitrary point (that closely matched what crenz had come up with) and only included those entries plus some more general categories.

Actually, I did include one extra country that got a lower score than several that I didn't include. But this country placed first in some internet related statistics, so I felt justified in cheating in that one case.

The survey listed three items that aren't currently (single) countries and these all scored higher than several other countries above so they each got their own entry even though they aren't currently (single) countries: Hong Kong, N/S Korea, and Belgium/Luxembourg. This is simply a reflection of the most useful data set that I found and has nothing to do with any political positions or opinions that I might hold.

The placement of countries into "parts" of Europe or continents or regions of the world was based on (my interpretation of) The CIA World Factbook 2002. Within each region, countries are sorted based on their scores in the survey.

Some may notice the absense of New Zealand. But it is just a suburb of Australia so I didn't include it even though it was listed separately in the survey. ;) I know for a fact that we have at least a couple of members from New Zealand (having had the oportunity to tease them) but, unfortunately, it scored 7 spots lower than the country I included as an exception, which scored 8 spots lower than our Middle Eastern countries (the lowest scorers of the rest). And I hope noone minds me grouping Turkey in The Middle East.

Okay, enough of these long, difficult polls. This has taken too much of my time. The next one will be on belly lint. q-: