One thing we can’t get enough of is all of these “Best of” or “Top Ten” lists. As a culture, we just love to rank things, but unfortunately not everything is that easily quantified. Take the internet, for example – a commercial platform, an open forum, an educational tool and so much more – to even think about trying to rank who does it best seems audacious to say the least.

But then again, if anyone does possess the audacity to attempt do so, it has to be Tim Berners-Lee, the man who first introduced conceived World Wide Web back in 1980s.

Earlier this week, Berners-Lee and his organization, The World Wide Web Foundation, announced their first ever annual Web Index, a rankings table that gives us some unprecedented insights into how the internet is used and its effectiveness in different countries across the world.

Topped by Sweden, with the likes of Yemen and Zimbabwe bringing up the rear, the Web Index aggregates a number of different categories, including obvious ones such as overall penetration, percentage of daily users, and infrastructure. It also throws in some more unusual, yet just as important ones, like the ability of a nation’s citizens to use the internet to mobilize themselves, or the number of entries in Wikipedia in a specific country’s language.

Sweden rules the roost by a country mile, with the United States coming in at a very close second place, followed by the UK in third. Canada was only just edged out of the ‘medal positions’, trailing the UK by less than a point.

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The list is far from comprehensive though, with only 61 of the two hundred or so nations in the world accounted for. Among the notable omissions are the Netherlands, which has some of the freest internet laws in the world, and would surely be a contender for the top ten had it been ranked. However, everybody’s favorite enemy of the internet, China, did make it in the list, coming in at 29^th place, no doubt boosted by its huge social media presence.

The Web Index certainly needs a lot more fine tuning though, as the World Wide Web Foundation freely admits:

“The Web Index will eventually allow for comparisons of trends over time and the benchmarking of performance across countries, continuously improving our understanding of the Web’s value for humanity.”