You may well stare: The rise and fall of entire civilizations could be contained within that computer!

“There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,” says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing.”

Few people in the world are better placed to feel the pulse of information flow than Schmidt, so I’ll take him on face value regarding the facts.  When he uses the expression “dawn of civilization”, it means he is not just talking about the Internet.  From clay tablets to newspapers and advertising fliers, everything is in there. Presumably also music cassettes, CD’s, movie reels and DVDs as well. Exabytes are unbelievably large: One quintillion bytes, or about 50 000 years of DVD-quality video.

Most of the new information is probably irrelevant or erroneous. For instance, over 90% of e-mail traffic is spam. (Microsoft says 97%, most other sources are lower though.) But Google is pretty good at filtering those:  Looking over the spam folder, which contains 30 days of spam, I found only one legitimate message, and it was a rather unimportant one, from a mailing list I’m on.  Likewise, I have had one spam-mail delivered in my inbox over the last month. Not perfect, but nearly so.

Twitter is a good example of the next level of “random” data: Even after you have subtracted the spammers, the relevance of what is left varies, to say the least. On my Twitter feed I get words of wisdom that will be valid and valuable as long as humans are humans. I also get product launches, and friends griping about their computer games and telling me what they have for dinner. Twitter is badly in need of tagging, but does not have it.

Modern blogs, on the other hand, have tagging.  However, it is often only available for those who write the blog, and their concepts may be different from yours.  Most notably, one person’s religion is another person’s superstition. In America in particular, one person’s political view is another person’s clinical insanity.

Even without using tags, though, Eric Schmidt boasts: “Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are.” That is an average, obviously. But more and more of the online content is photographs or even movies. Schmidt’s comment also puts Google Street View is a slightly different light…

Much of the new content is neither text nor pictures nor sound, but abstract data like information from cash registers, car counting devices etc. These seem utterly impersonal at the moment, but it may not always remain so. As the net of data grows ever finer, it becomes possible to track the individual whether he wants it or not. In fact, I would say that trying to retain anonymity in this age is like walking into a bank wearing a mask and gloves.  You will stand out as a shadow on the data:  This customer always pays with cash, does not wear a connected mobile phone, avoids buildings with video surveillance… there may already be government agencies looking out for such a pattern.

Now – what will YOU do with the world’s information when Google puts it in your hand and says “Here, take this!”?

***

(I picked up the quote from an article on ReadWriteWeb: Google CEO Schmidt: “People aren’t ready for the technology revolution”. They have some interesting information on that site, by the way. You may want to bookmark it for a rainy day.)