DailyDirt: The Ever-Growing Growth Of Data...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the future. Some folks will always predict doom and gloom, but we say, "The Sky Is Rising!" (loud and proud -- and again with sequel The Sky Is Rising 2). The advent of digital information has created an enormous wealth of data, and the amount of this digital awesomeness seems to be growing all the time. Here are just a few more examples of the amazing abundance of media that surrounds us.

• The Internet Archive has updated its Wayback Machine, indexing 5 petabytes of internet goodness, covering the web from 1996 to December 2012. That data is from over 240,000,000,000 URLs, and this virtual backup of the web doesn't even touch sites that have a login or a robot.txt file that blocks the Wayback Machine. [url]
• Sandvine's global internet phenomena report contains a prediction that US internet traffic may rise to over 700,000 exabytes per year by 2019. And if Netflix continues to do well (accounting for about double the amount of traffic as YouTube and crushing Amazon Video, Hulu and HBO Go), a lot of that traffic will be people watching streaming movies and TV shows (legitimately, too, not just using BitTorrent). [url]
• Every minute of the day, more and more data is generated. For example, 571 new websites per minute, 100K+ tweets per minute... gazillions of infographics and bazillions of random factoids. [url]
• Since the beginning of time until 2003, humans generated about 5 billion gigabytes of data... and now we generate that much every 2 days. And that rate is accelerating (but humans are not exclusively generating all that data). [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: data, factoids, internet archive, media, sky is rising, wayback machine
Companies: sandvine