Figures released today from web monitoring company Royal Pingdom highlight another repercussion of the skewed gender representation in tech - namely, the overwhelming predominance of male visitors to technology blogs.

Royal Pingdom looked a number of popular tech blogs, including ReadWriteWeb, and examined the ratio of male to female site visitors by using demographics data from Google's DoubleClick Ad Planner.

In a survey from last summer, comScore found that women outnumber men on social networking sites and tend to spend more time on those sites as well. But that interest and engagement hasn't seemed to spill over into the tech blogosphere.

What contributes to the difference? Is it a reflection of the tech industry at large? Is it the content on the sites? The authors' gender? The editorial voice or tone? Is it the community that surrounds it?

So to cap off a year that seemed to have its fair share of major meltdowns, the website monitoring company Royal Pingdom has posted its list of this year's major Internet incidents.

A failover fail in March knocked Wikipedia offline worldwide for several hours.

2. WordPress.com's big-blog crash

WordPress was down for 110 minutes in mid-February, the biggest outage the service had seen in four years.

3. Gmail's multiple outages

Although disruptions don't generally impact all Gmail users, the email service had several notable outages this year, including a 2.5 hour downtime in February, a 36 hour outage in March and a 2 hour outage in September.

4. China reroutes the Internet

In April, China Telecom purportedly spread incorrect traffic routes to the rest of the Internet, meaning that for 18 minutes, as much as 15% of Internet traffic was sent via China.

5. Twitter's World Cup woes

Twitter saw incredible growth this year, but tweeting became so popular, particularly during the World Cup, that Twitter broke. Repeatedly.

6. Facebook's feedback loop

Facebook was offline for 2.5 hours in September when a feedback loop overloaded its databases. Our own community manager Seamus Condron went so far during the outage as to post some helpful suggestions about how best to cope.

7. Foursquare's double whammy

Foursquare was down for 11 hours in October. The culprit: database issues. The site was down an additional 6 hours the next day as the engineers fixed things.

8. Paypal's payment problems

Problems with network equipment disrupted PayPal's service for 4.5 hours in October.

9. Tumblr's tumble

Tumblr has had a great year, and ReadWriteWeb just named it the Best LittleCo of 2010. But that success in part led to a 24 hour outage in December, when all of Tumblr's 11 million blogs were knocked offline.

10. The WikiLeaks drama

The WikiLeaks site experienced its own issues during its most recent document release, as it came under heavy DDoS attacks. The site then moved to Amazon Web Services, but was quickly ousted. The site then lost its DNS provider for the Wikileaks.org domain. The site has remained largely reachable via its IP address and over 2000 mirror sites have since sprung up. But the events surrounding WIkiLeaks have not merely interrupted the organization's website, as Amazon, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, EveryDNS and others have been targeted by DDoS attacks. "The Wikileaks drama is without a doubt the Internet incident of the year," says Royal Pingdom.

Do you see anything missing from this list? And care to offer any predictions about outages in 2011?

Based on data from StatCounter for October 2010, Asia and Africa have the highest share of mobile web usage. And as Royal Pingdom quips, "It is a bit ironic that mobile web usage, is relatively speaking, lower in Europe and North America than in much of Asia and Africa. At least when you consider all the attention that Android, iPhone, and smart-phones in general are getting over here."

The data in this report gives only averages, and obviously some countries within these regions have much higher rates than others. There are several countries in Africa, for example, that have mobile web usage below 10%. But many others have mobile web usage in excess of 20%. Chad, for example, has close to 29% and Nigeria has just over 25% of web usage coming form mobile phones.

Similarly, there is a disparity between mobile web usage across Asia, with countries like India and Bangladesh having about 15% mobile web usage.

Currently mobile makes up about 3.81% of web usage worldwide. But as many parts of the world do not have either the infrastructure for wired Internet nor access to other computer devices, mobile phones are the technology of choice.

And in most of these places, the phone of choice is Nokia. According to Royal Pingdom, "in every single one where mobile web usage makes up an unusually high share, Nokia's Symbian OS completely dominates. In some countries more than 90% of the mobile web traffic comes from Symbian phones." Android, iPhone, and Blackberry OS have very small market shares in many of these countries.

Distribution of Speeds - Within and Across Countries

Based on all countries' speeds - not just the top 50's - the world average Internet speed clocks in at around 1.8 Mbits/s. A little over a fifth of Internet connections are 5 Mbits/s or faster, and more than half are 2 Mbits/s or faster.

The most colorful chart in the Royal Pingdom report looks not just at the average speed within a country, but how speeds are distributed. This graphic shows that while the slowest connection speeds (256 kbit/s) have almost disappeared in most countries, that they still comprise a good proportion of how much of the world connects to the Internet.

The report also points out these advantages (from the Google help system) to switching to the newer javascript code:

• Faster, smaller source file
• Automatic detection of HTTPS
• Increased namespace safety
• More convenient set up for tracking ecommerce transactions
• More customizable code for interactive Ajax-based sites
• Enjoying new features and reports as they roll out

Examples of top-tier sites still using the old tracking code include Google properties Blogger and DoubleClick, along with Wired, FoxNews and IGN. Will these properties be given as long as they need to make the switch? We agree with the conclusion of the report, which states:

"When urchin.js is finally decommissioned, will thousands of sites be caught without working statistics? We're guessing that Google won't allow this to happen, but you never know."

Perhaps it's best to integrate the newer tracking code sooner rather than later.

Update: The Official Google Analytics Blog has a new post up today that definitively states that their urchin.js analytics script will not be decommissioned without clear advance warning first, and they in fact have no plans to do so for the immediate future. We appreciate the clarification, thanks Google!

Dave was around at the TechCrunch house later in the day and then we all went out for spicy noodles, a famous Scripting News dinner. And boy were those spicy noodles nice! My Silicon Valley initiation is now complete :-) Here's a picture of all the Web 2.0 Workgroup members, plus Gabe from memeorandum, at Jing Jing:

From left to right: Gabe, Dave, me, Mike, Fred

Ben Barren (in between subtle mocking of my paper-based millionaire status) calls all of this an "emerging land of absurdity where a live prototype that can be replicated in 90 days, that has no business model or revenue is considered a business."

So what's my opinion on all this? Well I'm right in the middle of Silicon Valley as I write this post. I've had a great time over here and I've felt lots of energy and enthusiasm from all the Web people I've met here. I've seen a Flock employee sleeping on the floor of the garage-office Flock occupies in Palo Alto, in mid-afternoon, due to overwork no doubt. People are putting in a lot of effort to build new Web-based businesses. It's OK to be slightly skeptical about the long-term value, but I have to say I still think it's a land of opportunity rather than absurdity. Admittedly I'm a pretty naive person when it comes down to it - or maybe just happy (as the Nirvana song goes).

OK so there's a lot of hype. So the VCs are throwing money around. So get to work. Build something Web-based that mainstream people will need and want. Now's the time to do it.