What Are People Actually Doing On The Web?

Talk about a sinkhole: According to comScore, a Web data tracker, Americans spent 302 billion minutes online last month. That's 6,760 lifetimes at 85 years apiece. Just where does all that time go?

Certainly the Web has come a long way from book shopping, e-mail and porn. Just in the last few years, terabyte-oceans of video content, courtesy of YouTube, has come crashing online; social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are corralling billions of eyeballs; and then there's Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people ), more a verb now than a virtual destination.

All that activity has huge implications–to put it lightly–for any sustainable business strategy (and right alongside, perhaps, our collective personal fulfillment). Forrester Research (nasdaq: FORR – news – people ) in Cambridge, Mass., figures that more than half of U.S. adults hop on the Internet every day, and three-quarters do it every month; even the silver-haired set now likes to surf.

So where exactly do all those people go on the Web–and more importantly, what do they do and think when they get there?…