{"id":504,"date":"2009-04-24T00:01:27","date_gmt":"2009-04-24T07:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=504"},"modified":"2009-04-23T16:51:23","modified_gmt":"2009-04-23T23:51:23","slug":"lots-of-digital-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=504","title":{"rendered":"Lots of Digital Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to PDAs, cell phones, Twitter, Facebook, and a host of other text-sharing applications, the human race is creating digital information at an alarming rate.
\n
\nAs you know, digital information is measured by the byte, which you can conveniently think of as a single character. For your review:<\/p>\n

1,000 bytes is a kilobyte, TB. Of course, it’s not really 1,000 bytes, it’s 1024 bytes. But why quibble over a few bytes?<\/p>\n

1,000,000 bytes is a megabyte, MB.<\/p>\n

1,000,000,000 (billion) bytes is a gigabyte, GB. That’s currently where our thinking dwells. Computer memory and storage capacity is currently measured in billions of bytes, or gigabytes.<\/p>\n

1,000,000,000,000 (trillion) bytes is a terabyte, TB.<\/p>\n

1,000,000,000,000,000 (quadrillion) bytes is a petabyte, PB.<\/p>\n

1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (quintillion) bytes is an exabyte, EB. One EB is one billion gigabytes. That’s a massive amount of information, which leads my to the point about storing all our crap:<\/p>\n

According to an article in the Columbia Journalism Review<\/a>, mankind created 161EB of digital information in the year 2006. That’s a massive amount of text, graphics, and stuff. It’s also 3,000,000 times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written up until 2006.<\/p>\n

The real scary news is that next year, 2010, mankind is set to produce over 988EB of digital information, close to one zettabyte<\/em> of information. That a sextillion<\/em> bytes, if you’re keeping count.<\/p>\n

From the article:<\/p>\n

There are more than 70 million blogs and 150 million Web sites today\u2014a number that is expanding at a rate of approximately ten thousand an hour. Two hundred and ten billion e-mails are sent each day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just because we create so much stuff doesn’t immediately make it worthy. There’s probably just as much good material being created today as there was 20 years go, and with the same quality. But as a percentage of the total, that good material is only a small portion of the grand total, a miniscule portion in fact.<\/p>\n

The problem for the future will not be where or how to store all the digital detritus we create, but how to cull through that massive pile of crap to find anything worthy. As anyone who’s done an in-depth Google search knows, just because it can be found doesn’t mean it’s worth anything. So perhaps there will be a market for those willing to find good information amongst the sextillion bytes of junk out there?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to PDAs, cell phones, Twitter, Facebook, and a host of other text-sharing applications, the human race is creating digital information at an alarming rate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=504"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":512,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions\/512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}