P2p file sharing explosion
Peer-to-peer file sharing has exploded with mp3 music files and digital video accounting for 70% of the files on the hard disks of users who’re into p2p.
Globally, the average Net user spends 11.5 hours online per month – but the average user in the US spends more than twice that time online.
So says a team led by professors Peter Lyman and Hal Varian of the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley.
Worldwide information production has increased by 30% each year between 1999 and 2002, says the team’s report, as quoted in the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal here.
New information flowing electronically on radio, television and the Internet in 2002 totaled nearly 18 exabytes, and the phone accounts for the largest percentage of information flow, with e-mail placing second.
[If, like me, you're wondering how much that is, one exabyte equals 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes. By comparison, a lowly kilobyte equals 1,024 bytes - ED]
‘Electronic channels’ – such as TV, radio, the telephone and the Internet – contained three and a half times more new information in 2002 than did the information that was stored, say the researchers.
And the amount of new information stored on paper, film, optical and magnetic media has doubled in the last three years with new information produced in those forms during 2002 equal to half a million new libraries, each containing a digitized version of the print collections of the entire Library of Congress.
