A new report from Forrester Research estimates that approximately 2.2 billion people will be online over the next few years - an increase of over 45 percent.

Asia will account for 43 percent of the world’s online population by 2013, with 17 percent in China alone.

Countries in Africa and the Middle East currently make up just 8 percent of the global online population, but will experience some of the highest growth rates over the next five years, around 13 percent, with Egypt, Iran, and Nigeria leading the way.

It will be interesting to see how the press of these nations, the nature of each obviously being inherently different, will develop with the proliferation of the Internet. The editor of Nigeria’s Punch, for example, expressed the opinion that publishers must accept the inexorable rise of the Internet as a challenging opportunity for newspapers to develop and improve their services.

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