The Data Explosion: Just How Much Information is Created Each Day?
Just think of how much new information the New York Times' website pumps out every day. The journalism giant covers business, politics, sports, and real estate. Its site is filled with columns, blogs, letters, and, of course, countless comments.
And that's just one day with one newspaper.
The online data explosion
Now consider all the rest of the information that fills the web on any given day. There are the newspapers, of course, splashing breaking news, human-interest stories, sports scores, and celebrity gossip across the web. There are countless bloggers writing about everything from the hot new restaurant in town to the 2012 presidential election.
That doesn't even take into account web sites run by universities, TV stations, city governments, radio networks, retailers, attorneys, and think tanks.
In short, the Internet is creating a data explosion, and it's an explosion that occurs every day.
Using web-generated information
What's most interesting, though, is how this information is being used. Say you send an email message or post a remark on an online forum. You can bet that computers are storing that information. Visit a website or click on a link that lets you buy a new pair of shoes from Amazon. You can bet, again, that a computer is automatically storing that information.
After all, there are plenty of people — most commonly advertisers or website operators — who want to know what their potential consumers are doing with their online time.
And, as a recent story by ABC News reports, the cost of storing this data is falling. This has led to a feeling among many that there is no real limit to how much or what type of Internet-generated data can be stored.
How much data is generated?
No one is quite sure just how much data is created every day. There are estimates, but perhaps David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, gets it most right. He told ABC News that the amount of new data created on the web each day is really anyone's guess.
What is certain, though, is that capturing and mining this data remains big business. Web surfers who believe that no one cares too much about what sites they visit or what content they post on online message boards are certainly incorrect in that assumption.
No comments:
Post a Comment