News.Com New data says there's lots of new data

"On Monday, researchers at the University of California evaluated, and contributed to, the information glut with the release of their report "How Much Information? 2003," which pegs the quantity of new information stored in 2002 at 5 exabytes, or 5 quintillion bytes.

That, said researchers at U.C. Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems, amounts to the print collections of the Library of Congress--500,000 times over."

redux [10.19.00]
The Economist Byte counters

"ALREADY drowning in too much information? At least you can now find out precisely how much you are missing: about two exabytes. (An exabyte is roughly a billion times a billion bytes, or the quivalent of about 20 billion copies of The Economist). This is the estimated amount of unique information the world is currently producing each year. At least, it is the figure calculated by a group of researchers at the School for Information Systems and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian.

Estimating the world's information output appears a rather superfluous undertaking. But soon, the authors of the study point out, it will be technologically possible for an average person to obtain access to virtually all recorded information."

UCB: School of Information Management and Systems Great surge in online radio listening

"The second striking fact is the ``democratization of data.'' A vast amount of unique information is created and stored by individuals. Original documents created by office workers are more than 80% of all original paper documents, while photographs and X-rays together are 99% of all original film documents. Camcorder tapes are also a significant fraction of total magnetic tape storage of unique content, with digital tapes being used primarily for backup copies of material on magnetic drives.

"This democratization of data is quite remarkable. A century ago the average person could only create and access a small amount of information. Now, ordinary people not only have access to huge amounts of data, but are also able to create gigabytes of data themselves and, potentially, publish it to the world via the Internet, if they choose to do so."

USA Today Society grappling with info overload

"This is an important milestone, says David Shenk, author of Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. "It's a sea change in how human beings deal with one another. It's no longer a question of access to information, but the challenge of weeding through to find what you need.""

""We have to be a lot more attentive to how well information is designed," Lyman says. "Until now, we've thought of information in the context of the medium it's stored in. Now we'll start to think of the medium in the context of how it's used.""

IBM Systems Journal It's not just information

"When people think about computers, they often think about information. They talk about information technology, the information age, the information superhighway. They discuss how computers enable people to send, access, and manipulate information in many new ways."

"But this focus on information is limiting and distorting. If we want to take full advantage of new computational technologies, and if we want to help people become better thinkers and learners, we need to move beyond these information-centric views of computing and learning."