Site of the week: www.nua.ie

Founded in 1995 by Gerry McGovern, Niall O'Sullivan and Antoin O'Lachtnain, Nua now has more than 200,000 readers and claims to be the world's number one resource for Internet trends. It's a claim that can be taken very seriously when publications such as the Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury News, USA Today, CNN Online Interactive Week have all written about it.

Last year Fortune magazine rated Nua among the top 10 Internet strategy companies in the world. As it says itself, "Nua's customers are large organisations that want to create value and profit from their information and knowledge."

So, why is a commercial business site being included on an education page? Because, as you can read in the main article here, the Internet is becoming so all-pervasive that there will very soon be no way of avoiding its touch. And if you want to learn more about the Internet, about where it is heading and how it is of use to you, you must be open to learning from various different sources.

Nua is most often accessed and quoted for its Internet surveys, which contains pretty much everything you need to know about the business side of the web. Hundreds of articles based on surveys carried out worldwide are archived here. If you don't have time to go through them all, you can sign up for a free e-mail service.

The internal search engine is fast and accurate. Clicking into one of the searched-for stories also leads to a series of suggested links to related stories, something that few sites do.

Nua is not just worth seeing for its business acumen though. The Internet as it relates to such issues as education, censorship, government legislation and privacy and security issues are all well catered for.

There is also demographic information on Internet use by children and teenagers which will be useful to any parent or teacher supervising web access.

Nua is an easy-to-use resource, with strong editorial content, which will be of interest to anyone who cares about the Internet.