Online competitive intelligence service Hitwise has found that U.S. visits to humanitarian Web sites increased 180 percent by January 1, 2005 compared to the prior week.

As of January 1 week's end, visits to news sites were up 17.1 percent compared to 5.5 percent the prior week. Search engines and directories were up 20 percent from the week before making up 29 percent of visitors. According to the Top 10 humanitarian sites visited by market share, the American Red Cross rated first, UNICEF (the United Nations Children Fund) rated second and The Hunger Site rated third. The blog site Tsunami Help rated tenth with market share activity increased by 1,926 percent between December 27 and December 31.

Through the blog Tsunami Help, "we see the ability of blogs to get information out and expand among news reporting. We are seeing an evolution of the way people are getting information; people are coming from news sites and referring to the blog site," says Bill Tancer, vice president of research, Hitwise.   

"Although it is encouraging to see the recent increase in activity," Mr. Tancer continues, "market share visits are on the downside and are still relatively small making up less than one percent of overall Internet activity."