OK, it's official. Time wasting on the Internet while at work can actually make you more productive.

However, try selling that claim to your supervisor. Even if you wave the research in his or her's face, I doubt you would get a smidgen of encouragement.

The research is by Brent Coker, from the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne. He found that surfing the Internet at work for pleasure actually increases concentration levels and helps make a more productive workforce.

"People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20 percent of their total time in the office - are more productive by about nine percent than those who don't," he writes.

To reach such a conclusion he studied the habits of 300 workers and found that 70 percent of those who use the Internet at work engage in what Coker labels as 'Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing' (WILB). See, there is an official name for your obsession.

Among the top uses are searching for information about products and reading online news sites. I would fire people for playing online games (fifth most popular) and for watching YouTube movies (seventh).

Coker explains the attraction of WILB by attributing time wasting to people's imperfect concentration.

"People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration," he says. "...It's the same in the work place. Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the Internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days work, and as a result, increased productivity."

Be warned however, Internet addition can have the opposite effect. About 14 percent of Internet users in Australia show signs of addiction, he says. Those with a tendency to always be online and surfing or e-mailing with have lower productivity than those who use it occasionally.

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Here is a site worth a visit, especially if you are a teacher looking for materials to make presentations more appealing: www.worlddigitallibrary.org The World Digital Library by UNESCO attempts to bring together digital records of the cultural materials stored at 32 institutions, including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina of Alexandria, Egypt.

The site will be officially launched on 21 April, but you can get a peek at what it can become. It will include digital versions of manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, and prints and photographs. The library will be accessible in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

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I was musing about the rise of Twitter, and the way businesses, including the media, have jumped on this latest technological bandwagon. A lot of regular media are now sending their reports on to Twitter in 140 character bursts, the limit for this messaging service.

Yet after a few tries at sending messages I feel my age. This does not connect. And it is also kind of funny that this kind of messaging, of writing short quick bursts harkens back to the kind of sentences that used to be sent by telegraph.

Now the telegram was a very efficient technology and lasted longer than many would have thought. The first telegram in the US was official sent on 24 May 1844 by Samuel Morse, the last probably sometime at the end of January 2006, when Western Union ended its service.

Sending a telegram was an exercise in brevity, as each word cost the sender. The need for brevity was satirized in Scoop, a 1938 novel by Evelyn Waugh. In Scoop, the pathetic foreign editor of the Daily Beast and the reporter William Booth keeps telegraphing for news on the war in a fictional African country. "More blood", was his cryptic message. Booth would telegraph an equally cryptic message about events, or non-events, and the rewrite desk in London would construct an entire fiction around it.

Twitter is just another option in the multiple options we have for communicating with each other. Back then, and for many, the telegraph was the only option.

Send any comments to Ahmed at elamin.ahmed@gmail.com