A Student's View: The Internet in Numbers

By Erica Wenham, Friday 25 January 2013.

1 is for the 1 billion+ users currently on Facebook. That is approximately 1 in 7 people on earth today. In fact, by the time you are reading this blog post, the number in users is sure to be much higher due to the ever-growing environment of social media!

2 is for the number of years (according to Moore’s law) it takes for computers software and hardware to double in processing power, memory capacity and other key measurements. Moore’s Law is a well-known observation in the computing world and it was first described by Gordon Moore who was co-founder of Intel.

3 is for the number of W’s in “World Wide Web” which allows us to view web pages and websites over the Internet (please note; these ARE two different things). The web was invented by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. Things like file sharing and Skype calling are two examples of uses of the Internet which don’t use the World Wide Web.

4 is for 4Chan, the origin of pretty-much everything which is either funny, offensive or both online! Essentially a messaging board, 4Chan spawn the “hactivist” board anonymous and is responsible for “memes” such as “lolcats”, “rick-rolling” and more. The Guardian once described the 4Chan community as “lunatic, juvenile, brilliant, ridiculous and alarming.”

5 is for the 5 million terror bytes of data that are online. A “terror byte” is a thousand times larger than a gigabyte and a million times larger than a megabyte. There is so much data available online that Google estimate that their search engines of index is only 0.04% of it.

6 is for the 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world as of July 2012; with 5 million of these in the developing world. That’s 6 mobile phones for every 7 people on the planet! In fact, it’s common for citizens in developing countries to only have access to the Internet through their mobile phone or device. In the UK alone, there are more mobile phones than people with 52% of UK phone-owners using a smartphone.

7 is for the 7 out of 10 people in the developed world that are connected to the Internet in some way, shape or form. Internet access isn’t just for the developed world either; one third of the world’s entire population is connected to the Internet, with 8 new people connecting online for the first time every single second.

8 is for the 80% of all emails that are spam. Hopefully you all have good anti-spam filters set up on your email account so they don’t make their unwanted way into your inbox. Spam can range from shoddy selling techniques, banking/buying scams to unwanted emails from social networking websites. Some people say that spam actually stands for “stupid, pointless, annoying messages”.

9 is for the 90% of companies that use social media for recruitment purposes. And I’m not just talking about LinkedIn; although 94.5% of recruiters say they have successfully hired a candidate they have found via LinkedIn. In addition to this, 42% of recruiters have also used Twitter to try and find potential candidates and 33% have used Facebook.

10 is for the 10 minutes that it takes for one million tweets to be posted to Twitter at any given time. It took Twitter 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to reach their 1 billionth tweet and now, it takes less than 3 days!

Post inspired by Nobull Communications: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iKvP1pkN_Y


Thank you for reading! If you think I should write another post on “The Internet in Numbers” on 11-20 (or more) please comment below.

No comments:

Post a Comment