Size of the Internet,Data growth, Information overload, knowledge tsunami- all that.

First some statistics – because we love statistics because…I have no idea why…

At what rate is the Internet growing? According to a Chinese research, the internet doubles in size every 5.32 years.

The study was conducted retrospectively from December 2001 to December 2006, with the sample taken every six months

At what rate is the number of websites on the Internet growing? It has picked up terrific pace in the past couple of years. Here is the rate of growth since 1996:

1996 : 0.6%
1997 : 1.2%
1998 : 2.2%
1999 : 5.9%
2000 : 17.6%
2001 : 9.1%
2002 : -1.3
2003 : 10.6%
2004 : 12.1%
2005 : 17.1%
2006 : 31.6%
2007 : 48.7%
2008 : 29.9%

Three great reference sites:

http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/

What is the size  of the internet?

1) How many people use the Internet?

2)How many websites are on the Internet

3)How many bytes of data are consumed on the Internet

4)How much traffic per second?

1) how many people use the Internet?This can be viewed as the population of the Internet, and so would seem to be a decent gauge of its size. Many different companies try to measure Internet usage, ranging from Nielsen Ratings to the Office of the CIA to Serverwatch. The general answer seems to be that just over a billion people used the Internet in 2008. Of these, about 500 million use the Internet at least once a week, making them more-or-less permanent citizens of the Internet population.

2) There are thought to be some 155 million websites on the Internet, but this number fluctuates wildly from month to month, and one runs into a problem of what exactly constitutes a website. Is a person’s individual Facebook page its own website? How about their LiveJournal or blog? What if the blog is hosted by a blog service?

3)It may be that what most people mean when they ask the size of the Internet is how many bytes it takes up. Estimating that is a fairly difficult task, but one person made an estimate not so long ago who can probably be trusted to have a good idea. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, the world’s largest index of the Internet, estimated the size at roughly 5 million terabytes of data. That’s over 5 billion gigabytes of data, or 5 trillion megabytes. Schmidt further noted that in its seven years of operations, Google has indexed roughly 200 terabytes of that, or .004% of the total size.

4)People estimate there are roughly 75 million servers worldwide, but this number may be off by up to a factor of five. The traffic that runs through the Internet in a single day might seem like it would be easily measured, but in fact it is very hard to find a reliable collection of this data, because of the sheer amount of computers, servers, and nations involved.

see: – http://www.internettrafficreport.com/

Domain Names

Verisign has revealed that around 11 million domain names were registered during the last quarter of 2009 pushing the total
number of domain name registrations to 192 million, 25 years after dotcom domain names were released.

The renewal rate of domain names reached 71 percent in the fourth quarter, a timid increase of half a percent.

This means that nearly 30 percent of all domain names registered are allowed to expire.

Amongst other data released by Verisign is the fact that 37 percent of domains (that’s almost two out of every five domain

names) either point to a single page (the homepage) or point to nothing at all.

Rate of Information Growth

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/

The fastest increasing quantity on this planet is the amount of information we are generating. It is (and has been) expanding
faster than anything else we create or can measure over the scale of decades. That means that at the very edge of change,
where change changes the most, information is leading. Information is accumulating faster than any material or artifact in
this world, faster than any by-product of our activities. The rate of growth in information may even be faster than any
biological growth at the same scale.

Two economists at UC Berkeley calculated our total global information production for one year. In their study “How
much information?” researchers Hal Varian and Peter Lyman measured the total production of all information channels in the
world for two different years, 2000 and 2003. Their totals include the information found on all analog media such as paper,
film, and tape, as well as in all digital media such as hard disks and chips, and through all bandwidth such as TV, radio and
telecommunications. Their tally focused on unique information, rather than just bits, since a duplicate of a song (or photo, or
database) does not contain any real additional information. Therefore they counted a newly recorded song as new
information, but not all the copies of that song, even though those additional copies would require storage space and
transmission bandwidth.

Varian and Lyman estimate that the total production of new information in 2000 reached 1.5 exabytes. They explain that is
about 37,000 times as much information as is in the entire holdings Library of Congress. For one year! Three years later the
annual total yielded 3.5 exabytes. That yields a 66% rate of growth in information per year.Increasing yearly
The long-term trend is simple: the information about and from a process will grow faster than the process itself. Productivity
generates excess information, and so as we progress, information will grow faster than whatever else is being produced.

We can approach the question from the other side. If it isn’t information, then what other measurable quantity is growing
fastest in the world over the span of decades? What is growing faster than 66% for decades — that is not information based?

Economists peg physical production as growing at 3% a year in advanced countries, and maybe 7% a year in superstars like
China. That means that information grows 10 times as rapidly as physical production.

It is hard to imagine anything else in the world that could possibly grow that fast. Even with information it is hard to imagine
how it could continue to expand at that yearly rate, since humans are not reproducing at that rate. How could information
continue to accumulate at 66% per year for decades more? With machines.

Most humans can consume more information in an hour than they generate(so much easier to watch a video than to make one)

But machines can generate more information than they consume day and night.Embedded sensors, cameras with no human eyes, bots on the web, computer-run systems all generate enormous oceans of data outside of human view.

It is plausible to image the global sphere of information expanding exponentially as data generation becomes mechanical.

Great Post

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/02/the_speed_of_in.php

And my point is: -

Yes it is Exciting to be in a world at this time when technology gives us the ability to watch technology and be amazed.

Where a business a minute is set up to peddle ‘information marketing’. Check your inbox if you like Internet marketing how many MBs is your Google or Yahoo  inbox up to now with ‘deals’ and secrets and specials and once in a lifetime offers.?

Gang there is only so many ways to get ‘traffic; to a web site, and its not a secret. There’s only so many ways to attractc search engines,and yes the algorithms change over time, but the ways to attract are broadly the same. There’s really only a couple of ways to set up your own website and get a domain name. And there’s only the same old ways to make money on the Internet. And its not a secret.

But we love new, and we love the hidden mystery and we want more. So welcome to world of ‘data’.

But most data is as they say ‘wild’ – a facebook post, a million facebook posts, five million facebook posts, infinite variations on itune/iPod play lists – these are classified, and counted as data.

The Most Important Data

How does you become successful? Same question – same answer – never changes.

How to you find love – same old question, answer never changes

How to do find happiness – answer hasn’t changed in recorded history

How do you learn to love your life – data or no data – answer had s never and will never change.

But maybe because all the answers to those questions are so ‘available’ so ‘ in plain sight’, maybe thats why we miss them, every time, as we make a new playlist and post a new cryptic facebook/twitter/buzz/digg/delicious post

The ‘data ‘ we need to have a wonderful life is a small amount, and freely available. No secret, no opt-ins, no paypal.

Its simpler than we think.

Breathe.

Repeat.