How Much Information, 2003 is a "study of information storage and flows (which) analyzes the year 2002 in order to estimate the annual size of the stock of new information contained in storage media, and heard or seen each year". So, how much new information was created last year?
Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.
How big is five exabytes? If digitized, the nineteen million books and other print collections in the Library of Congress would contain about ten terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections.
Here are a few megabytes which you may wish to add to your own reading pile:
- ComuputerWorld's salary survey for 2003
- FPMastering -- a 12-part series on information management
- Sarbanes-Oxley will change your life -- a very quick overview of this piece of legislation and its impact on business process management
- Benefits of XML in Business
- Managing and Documenting Your Project XML Style (via creativetechwriter)
- Essential Reading for Intranet Professionals -- you may have heard about/read a few of these already
- Information Management Weblog -- KM, CM, web development, other stuff
- experience curve -- a CRM blog
- Research Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines -- a great big PDF that you can download and print
- a web analytics tutorial
- various web analytics whitepapers
(BTW, link to the 'How Much Information' site is via InfoDesign.)