Virtual commodities: An exploratory analysis of academic institutions on the internet

Historically, academic institutions have played an important role in the development of the Internet. From its humble beginnings as ARPANET, to Abilene and the Internet2 project, colleges and universities in the United States continue to maintain an active presence on the Information Superhighway. However, not all US academic institutions share a major presence on the Web. Is this merely a function of institutional size? Research funding? Location? This paper explores a variety of factors to determine why some universities are more active on the WWW than others. This exploratory analysis is accomplished through the use of powerful querying options available on commercial search engines, ordinary least squares regression, and a geographic information system. Results indicate that although institutional size is a significant factor, Carnegie designation, location, and Internet availability on campus also contribute toward explaining Internet presence.