With the recent news about Google’s attempts to digitize the libraries of the world, I can start to see that the size of the internet will soon be equivalent to the size of ‘all information’. Here are a few infographics I’ve found online (from the Washington Post and Focus.com respectively):
The Amount of Information in the World
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/03/the_amount_of_i.php
The Staggering Size of the Internet
http://mashable.com/2011/01/25/internet-size-infographic
The Size of Internet to Double Every 5 Years
http://www.labnol.org/internet/internet-size-to-double-every-5-years/6569
Moore’s Law is a famous statement by Intel founder Gordon Moore predicting that the number of transistors on a CPU would double every 18 months. This law, which first appeared in 1965, has held true for almost half a century, and now is a model for future predictions of technology trends.
So it’s not very surprising that Chinese researchers now believe that Internet growth can be predicted using a Moore’s Law variant. Based on data collected at six month intervals between December 2001 to December 2006, the researchers claim that the Internet doubles in size every 5.32 years, which although higher than the 18 months of Moore’s Law, represents the same exponential growth pattern.
