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Ed Webb

Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...anity-digital-output-zettabyte

technology information storage data datamining surveillance internet social media socialmedia

shared by Ed Webb on 04 May 10 - Cached
  • Every man, woman and child on the planet using micro-blogging site Twitter for a century. For many people that may sound like a vision of hell, but for watchers of the tremendous growth of digital communications it is a neat way of presenting the sheer scale of the so-called digital universe.
  • the growing desire of corporations and governments to know and store ever more data about everyone
  • experts estimate that all human language used since the dawn of time would take up about 5,000 petabytes if stored in digital form, which is less than 1% of the digital content created since someone first switched on a computer.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • A zettabyte, incidentally, is roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States.
  • Mobile phones have dramatically widened the range of people who can create, store and share digital information."China now has more visible devices out on the streets being used by individuals than the US does," said McDonald. "We are seeing the democratisation and commoditisation of the use and creation of information."
  • About 70% of the digital universe is generated by individuals, but its storage is then predominantly the job of corporations. From emails and blogs to mobile phone calls, it is corporations that are storing information on behalf of consumers.
  • actions in the offline world that individuals carry out which result in digital content being created by organisations – from cashpoint transactions which a bank must record to walking along the pavement, which is likely to result in CCTV footage
  • "unstructured"
  • "You talk to a kid these days and they have no idea what a kilobyte is. The speed things progress, we are going to need many words beyond zettabyte."
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