Christmas is a great time for reflection. No more so than if you work with your head in an increasingly fluffy cloud of digital content. For those of us lucky to be with our extended families, the Winter holiday forces you to spend time in the company of people who have their technology toes on the ground,and use the internet at their convenience, not every twittering minute of the day.

Which is why this story caught my eye this afternoon. It's a survey that reveals that more people use the internet to keep up with the latest news than ever. As reported by John Paczkowski in All Things Digital, "40 percent identified the Internet as their primary source for national and international news. Thirty-five percent identified newspapers and 70 percent identified television."

Sounds impressive, but this is very much a 'dog bites man' moment.  I reckon it's a safe guess that most people still read their internet newspapers in the same way they read traditional print media. That is, they open the pages, read, link out to another story, and that's about it. There's no real behavioural shift and certainly little use of RSS readers and any other push model. The numbers are impressive, it's just that we're still very much in the Web 1.0 (if that's the expression) world, especially when you are home for the holidays.

Again, it's important not to get all smug about the fact that those of us in the media were getting our news this way half-a-dozen years ago or longer. The reason that there's a mass online readership today is that the technology is now cheap, it works, and there's a vast amount of authoratative content out there being updated minute-by-minute. So let's be grateful for this achievement, just for a moment. And here's wishing for a little less hype in 2009. We can but hope.