10,000 silver surfers flood onto the web

This week 10,000 older people will switch on a PC and surf the internet for the first times as part of Silver Surfer Week.

The aim of the initiative - organised by Age Concern - is to narrow the yawning digital divide between young and old.

All week, older people have been attending events and workshops across the country to help them discover the internet. Microsoft for example has had a bus touring the south coast resorts favoured by older people, offering technology taster sessions in towns including Bournemouth and Bognor Regis.

Almost half of Britain's over-50s have no access to a computer - around 8.4 million people.

An Age Concern spokesman explained: "We are looking at the issue of digital exclusion which is quite a concern to us. Some older people are being left behind because they don't get access to technology. Some older people think they haven't needed technology until now so why should they need it.

"We are trying to get 10,000 older people that have no experience of technology to mess around with it, to introduce them to the net and that kind of thing."

As well as communicating with friends and family, internet shopping holds lots of potential for older people, Age Concern said: "Massive savings can be made online and if you have to live on a pension any saving that you can make is a good thing."

This means a large untapped market of potential customers - good news for companies looking to increase their online sales. And business isn't the only sector that can benefit from more silver surfers: the government is also keen to see more old people get online, as it wants to push more services onto the internet. As the elderly are some of the biggest consumers of government services, it's vital they are comfortable on the net if the initiative is to succeed.

So far it looks as if creating more silver surfers won't be a problem. As Age Concern points out, when older people go online they "totally fly". Its figures show that more than half of older people that do have a PC believe the benefits of having it outweigh the running costs - and two out of five said they couldn't live without it.

According to web analysis by Hitwise, gone are the days when the internet was the sole domain of the young and the tech-savvy.

It found that around one in eight visits to websites comes from internet users aged 55-plus, and that their surfing is very similar to that of younger surfers - with Google, Hotmail and eBay topping the charts.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the internet sites that attract the largest percentage of visits from silver surfers are Ancestry.co.uk and Genes Reunited. Other favourites include travel and cruises websites where silver surfers accounted for 38 per cent of visits in the past four weeks.

Hitwise UK research director Heather Hopkins said in a statement that the most popular destinations for all age groups are search engines, email and portals. She added: "Comparing the top 10 sites visited by silver surfers with those visited by the 18 to 24 age group, there was only one difference - MySpace, the popular social networking site."