This comes from Bruce Mehlman and Larry Irving writing for the Sacramento Bee:
The exponential explosion of digital content on the Internet is
striking. YouTube.com alone consumes as much bandwidth today as the
entire Internet consumed in 2000. Users upload 65,000 new videos every
day and download 100 million files daily, a 1,000 percent increase from
just one year ago.
This explosion of new data comprises the "Exaflood" and we’d best start thinking about how to deal with it. Ultimately, however, they see it as generally beneficial:
The impending exaflood of data is cause for excitement. It took two
centuries to fill the shelves of the Library of Congress with more than
57 million manuscripts, 29 million books and periodicals, 12 million
photographs, and more. Now, the world generates an equivalent amount of
digital information nearly 100 times each day. The explosion of digital
information and proliferation of applications promises great things for
our economy and our nation, as long as we are prepared.
I don’t disagree with the idea or it’s logic. I do, however, question whether physical/social/economic limits to growth of the energy supplies needed to keep the infrastructure the exaflood would rely on will interfere with it’s coming about. I also wonder how effectively indxing engines and such will be able to manage the new material in such quantity. We’ll see. Here’s to hoping for the best.
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