How Much Info Is There? The Answer Is Coming
June 3, 2008
A happy quack to the colleague who sent me the link to this story: “Groundbreaking UC San Diego Research Study to Measure ‘How Much Information?’ Is in the World”. You can read this story here.
What hopped off the screen was this statement:
We have designed this research as a partnership between industry and academics to take the next steps in understanding how to think about, measure, and understand the implications of dramatic growth in digital information,” said Professor Roger Bohn of UC San Diego, co-leader of the new program. “As the costs per byte of creating, storing, and moving data fall, the amounts rise exponentially. We know that overall information technology increases productivity and human welfare, but not all information is equally valuable.”
Wizards from many high-profile organizations will work to answer this question. In the meantime, I’ll keeping upgrading my storage devices and parking data on cloud storage services. My data grows 2X each year. I wonder how much data my neighbor’s 14-year-old video music collector stores. I’m certain he’ll provide hard data. Maybe it will be easier to ask his parents. Neither uses a computer. Also, I bet the folks in Brazil, China, India, and Thailand, among other data centric countries will be particularly forthcoming.
I’m looking forward to the results of this study.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Comments
2 Responses to “How Much Info Is There? The Answer Is Coming”
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Studies like this have already been done and findings and meters
are out there. The challenge is giving it traction.
The ramification for “Beyond Search” would be quantifying and
conceptualizing the market for various types of search which I believe
will include the following but not in this order and probably leaving a few categories out and hiding the real opportunities. I have included examples
in parentheses.
* free informational web search (Google, Clusty)
* free registration-based database “invisible web” search (Kompass, Skyminder)
* commercial subscription-based database web search (Dialog, Thomson)
* non-accessible consultant-type repositories (Blackwater-like)
* transactional proprietary CRM BSS OSS & other log-based search (telecom)
* other “behind the firewall” informational search (corporate, government or ngo)
* offline single-point or local search (CD-based, for instance)
arc, thanks for adding your comments. The task of determing how much digital information exists seems Sissyphian.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2008 8 am Eastern