In a country known for its love of 'big' tourist attractions, we're now seeing another big icon emerge: the big downloader.
To rival tourist attractions that include the illustrious Big Banana and the Big Prawn, Australia may have to erect another icon to our worship of all things big: the Big Computer Hard Disk. And we have the Dutch based Mininova site site to thank for all this.
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| The 'Big Prawn' at Ballina in NSW |
According to a Torrentfreak report, Australians visited the BitTorrent website more than 6 million times for the month of April - that's pretty big in our books.
Forget the glaring legal ramifications for a moment and reflect on those stellar numbers: There's now 6 million reasons to suggest that downloading is the new Australian pastime - up there with a summer BBQ or a swim at the beach.
Mininova's internal stats also show just how much growth the BitTorrent site is gaining year on year. According to the Torrentfreak report, Mininova saw a whopping 50% increase (4.1million) on the same month in 2008, making BitTorrent one of the few growth industries during the current recession.
Whether more than a third of Australia's population are rabid P2P hounds, we're not so sure. Still, it seems we love our BitTorrent like we love a toilet out the back and a verandah out the front. For the full list of Big tourist attractions in the land downunder, click here for more details.
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| The 'Big Bench' at Broken Hill in NSW |
Downloaders often defend their actions because of our poor TV scheduling (as some have pointed out in posts on Torrentfreak), forcing many viewers to wait months to see their favourite US produced TV episode, or wait ages to see a film under our sluggish cinema release schedule.
Either way, in a town somewhere on an outback or coastal highway, don't be surprised to see early construction of that 'big' hard disk being built.