Information Overload info2go 817 656-3099

21st Century Information Overload: Not all information is available on the web. Not all information is reliable. Not all information is free. Information overload can overwhelm clients who are on a short deadline. Ineffectively rendered research services can be very costly and of little value to a client. On the other hand if done well (by info2go) the services can be affordable and immensely valuable.

Trade sources anticipated the rate of growth of the information industry to increase dramatically by 2010. The demand for independent information professionals is growing at an unprecedented rate.

In the US today there are approximately:

3.4 million books in print
2,500 Newspapers
20,200 Mass Market Periodicals
10,500 Scholarly Journals
The number of Domain names has increase from less than 2 million in 1991 to 16 million in 1997 to 172 million as of June 2003. 7.3 million web pages are added per day. Google reports over 2 billion Web documents and 1.5 million urls.

These web figures only scratch the surface of the Internet. The Deep Web, or Invisible Web, is estimated to be 400 to 550 times larger than the indexed web.

In a 2000 study which attempted to measure the amount of information annually produced in the world, Senior Researchers Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian of UCLA Berkeley conclude that

"The world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or 1018 bytes. Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total. Magnetic storage is by far the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard drive capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for information storage...Approximately 240 terabytes (compressed) of unique data are recorded on printed media worldwide each year."
Resources Consulted:
Books in print
ClickZ Stats Formerly CyberAtlas Trends & Statistics, The big picture
Lyman, Peter and Hal R. Varian, How Much Information. School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, 2003.
Public Agenda Online: Internet Speech/Privacy
Russ Haynal’s ISP Page
Russ Haynal’s Internet growth charts
Search Engine Watch
Ulrich’s guide to periodicals