The PC industry has been hit hard this year, but it has fared better than initially predicted.

Gartner, which in June forecasted a 6 percent fall in PC shipments this year, reports that the actual total will be 2 percent, with 285 million PCs shipping in 2009.

“Mobile PC shipments have regained substantial momentum, especially in emerging markets, and the decline in desk-based PC shipments is slowing down,” said Gartner research director George Shiffler.

In the first half of 2009, sales were down 4.4 percent year-over-year.

Gartner’s predictions have gotten increasingly positive as 2009 has progressed. In March, the research company projected an 11.9 percent drop in sales, the worst-ever industry decline.

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A new study by The CleanTech Group reinforces the argument that e-readers are ultimately more eco-friendly than print.

The production of one e-reader is the equivalent of the production of 22.5 paper books.

CleanTech predicts that e-readers will save 9.9 billion kg of CO2 over the next 3 years, when e-reader sales are expected to reach 14.4. In 2012, CleanTech predicts, e-readers will save 5.3 billion kg of CO2.

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Analysts predict that e-paper, the display technology used in e-readers, will reach nearly $10 billion in revenues in 2009.

Research group DisplaySearch predicts that 1.8 billion units will ship in 2018, totaling $9.6 in revenue.

DisplaySearch forecasts a compound annual growth rate of 41 percent for revenues and 64 percent for units shipped. Total revenue in 2009 is expected to be $431 million, more than triple last year’s $129 million.

“E-paper displays are taking off with consumers due to their low power consumption and ease of reading, especially in sunlight,” said Jennifer Colegrove, director of display technologies at DisplaySearch.

“In addition, e-paper displays are ‘green’ because they reduce paper consumption,” Colegrove said.

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The thing that stops many new Twitter users in their tracks is the visual chaos. Twitter is a messy place, with short verbal blasts and bit.ly links flying in all directions, a far cry from the minimalist restraint of Facebook profiles.

Pear Analytics studied Twitter’s noise-to-message ratio, analyzing 2,000 public tweets generated between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. CST over a two-week period.

They placed tweet content into five categories: News (minus tech news, which Pear took out of the category), Spam, Self Promotion (corporate self promotion, not the kind you see on Facebook), Pointless Babble (the kind you see on Facebook), Conversational (tweets that turn into conversation) and those with Pass Along Value (anything retweeted).

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Last week, Ignite Social Media published a fat social network demographics report which covers more than 40 of the top sites (PDF).

Ignite’s numbers were culled from search data, so they have to be taken with a grain of salt, but they do highlight some popular conceptions that might have to be reexamined, especially in regards to the idea of Twitter’s population being considerably older and more male than Facebook’s.

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If spam were the economy, all would be golden.

“If the economy could rebound as spam has done in second quarter, we would all be much happier with our retirement accounts,” according to the Q2 McAfee Threats Report (PDF), which notes that, after recovering from the high profile shutdown of the McColo botnet last November, spam has increased nearly 80 percent over Q1.

Spam and zombies — hijacked computers — reached record levels in Q2. Fourteen million new zombies were found by McAffee during this quarter, meaning that more than 150,000 new zombies were created each day.

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The convergence continues, as dumb phones and desktops cede passage to smartphones and notebooks, two devices that in a few years’ time will likely become one.

Mobile phone shipments fell 10.8 percent year-over-year in Q2 2009, dropping from 302.2 million unit shipments in Q2 2008 to 269.6 million in Q2 2009, according to IDC.

“The challenges from the previous nine months – aggressive channel destocking, foreign exchange volatility, and uncertain demand – continued to plague the mobile phone market in the second quarter, but were not as severe as before,” says IDC’s Ramon Llamas.

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If you don’t already know about this online personal finance management tool, I encourage you to check out Mint.com.

Unlike previous Google killers, Microsoft’s Bing has impressed enough people out of the gate that it has not been ripped to shreds as the world’s worst fail, the fate bequeathed to any new search engine that doesn’t immediately dethrone Google.

Bing’s success is far from universal; people have found plenty of problems with it. But some are truly impressed. ComScore reports that Microsoft’s search penetration has jumped three percent since Bing launched June 3.

The rebranded search engine rose 2.1 percent the week of its launch to 15.8 percent penetration. The following week, it grew to 16.7 percent.

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Social media activities are big with female US Internet users, and one fast growing portion of this is women who use blogs. In a March survey from BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners, “2009 Social Media Study,” 55 percent of women on the Internet interact with blogs in some way. This number is dwarfed by the percentage that use social networking services, 75 percent, but does trump message boards or forum usage - forty percent, and status updating services (read: Twitter) use - sixteen percent.

In the same study, published in eMarketer today, twelve million social media users (29 percent) post to blogs and eight million (19 percent) publish blogs. Since 54 percent of female social media users read blogs, that means that more than a half post and more than a third publish their own content.

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