March 7, 2007

This brief excerpt from Doc Searls’ blog is an example of what has always driven me crazy about the notion of "unconferences" that Dave Winer worked at popularizing a year or so ago.

Eur and My Open Space
I’ll be going to Identity Open Space (IOS) in Brussels on April 26-27. The more I go to open space workshops the more impressed I am with how much better they are for Getting Things Done than traditional speaker & panel conferences. It’ll be good to witness and take part in some of the European mojo behind user-centric identity development. Look forward to seeing some of ya’ll there.

Opening Space as a process for identifying, surfacing and addressing thorny issues has been around for a long time … long, long before Winer offered up the term "unconference" … and is more robust and better thought through than what has been suggested as "unconferencing".

That’s only a partially serious question … it all goes between our collective ears somehow.  And I guess a fair bit goes to the Internet Archive somehow, as well as millions hard drives all over the world.

From 5 exabytes annually to 161 exabytes annually in  3 years.  That’s a substantial growth rate.

Via CNN.com

Study: Digital information ballooning
March 6, 2007

• Study: World generated 161 billion gigabytes of data in 2006
• Deleting e-mail helps free up storage space
• Storage space is not scarce and continues to get cheaper

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) — A new study has estimated how much digital information is zipping around — hint: it’s a lot.

The report, assembled by the technology research firm IDC, sought to account for all the ones and zeros that make up photos, videos, e-mail, Web pages, instant messages, phone calls and other digital content cascading through our world today. The researchers assumed that an average digital file gets replicated three times.

Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes — 161 exabytes — of digital information last year.

That’s like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. Or you might think of it as 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. You’d need more than 2 billion of the most capacious iPods on the market to get 161 exabytes.

The previous best estimate came from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who totaled the globe’s information production at 5 exabytes in 2003.

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