John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, via Alex Barnett;
Petabyte (PB)
1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1015 bytes
1 Petabyte: 3 years of EOS data (2001).
2 Petabytes: All U.S. academic research libraries.
20 Petabytes: Production of hard-disk drives in 1995.
200 Petabytes: All printed material.
Exabyte (EB)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1018 bytes
2 Exabytes: Total volume of information generated in 1999.
5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings.
Alex points out;
The high-end estimate of the amount of information held within the deep web (database-drvien) in 2002 is 92,000 terabytes of information. This represents around 1.75% of the total amount of information produced in 2002. Small fry. To contrast this, just over 8% of the world's information created in 2002 was generated by email (not including spam or marketing) - around 440,000 terabytes - equivalent to over four times the amount of 'deep' web content that existed that same year.
Hardly a wonder that relevance, attention, and folksonomies are all the rage ....
