online activity>> Research • US
Every person on the planet using micro-blogging site Twitter for a century. For analysts of digital communications this is a neat way of presenting the growth of the digital universe in 2009. Research estimates the digital universe grew by 62 per cent in 2009 to 800,000 petabytes—petabyte is a million gigabytes. The study conducted by US technology consultancy idc estimates this is the equivalent of a century’s tweeting by all of Earth’s current population—it is also reckoned as the equivalent of information 75-billion Apple iPads can store.
The explosion of online activity has also introduced a new word to the nerd lexicon: a zettabyte, roughly half a million times the collections of all US academic libraries. The current digital output is .9 zettabyte; it’s expected to blast the zettabyte barrier by 2011.
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