So, as measured by the semi-standard metric for data storage (the US Library of Congress, or LoC), we created 500,000 LoCs in 2002. That’s 5E5 times the amount of data contained in the LoC.
To put that number in semi-human terms, thats 800 MB (mega-bytes, where mega-x is equal to xE6)* per human on Earth (roughly 6 billion). 800 MB was the capacity of a good-sized hard drive less than five years ago, and it was an amount of storage quite beyond practicality less than thirty years ago.
*(I didn’t choose the prefixes. UC-Berkeley did. I would have chosen the base-two exbi- (2[sup]60[/sup]) and mebi- (2[sup]20[/sup]), but I didn’t run the study.)
Suddenly, hard drive manufacturing looks like a huge growth industry.
neutron star: I’d bet (almost) anything that they mean 81 GB each. Your interpretation simply makes no sense (What, each blog only contains 28 KB? I run programs bigger than that!).
Blogs as a whole, according to (my interpretation of) their numbers and my trusty HP-48GX, account for 2.349E17 bytes, or 234.9 PB (petabytes), or more than all printed material (200 PB). Which seems a bit high, but more reasonable than 81 GB.
(But if you have a hard drive that can contain 2E18 bytes, or 2 EB (exabytes), I’m sure the Library of Congress would love to make a few (200,000) backups of itself. (Oh, you could also just barely fit in the total information output of 1999. Your call.))
As for their other decisions, I’m betting it made the math easier. You can hardly blame them.
81GB of text for each user? I have a 200-page ebook that’s 1.4MB. At that rate, each blogger would have to write 11.5 million pages to fill up 81GB apiece.
neutron: But don’t blogs contain images and massive flash animation and their author’s egos and … ?
OK, I didn’t read the study. Grabbing PDFs on a dialup can be painful. But I’ll admit that I began to doubt my own post when I suddenly realized that, by my numbers, blogs would account for 40% of all new information created in 2003. I didn’t think the year was that dull.
The notion of you having room to store all of the blogs on your PC is cool, though. I could on mine and have a good fraction of one drive free and one whole drive unused. 81 GB simply isn’t what it used to be, eh?
Waitasec. Your computer has (more than) 648 GB of disk space? Is that a PC?
That’s impressive, but I think you ought to add another 400GB (or whatever) to take you to the one terabyte level. For no reason beyond bragging rights.
(Oh, you could also just barely fit in the total information output of 1999. Your call.))