The Internet Hears a Who

At a place very big.
Where they study the very small.
They had a large problem.
That brought work, to a crawl.

I have a fair thought.
How to share our ideas.
We’ll use this new Internet
And free, we shall decree it

A new language
A new protocol
A page and a server
It will all link together
And will grow with great fervor

Little did he know
When his physicist gang
Started using his web
Sir Tim Berners-Lee,
Had created a big bang.

“CERN would agree to make the underlying code available on a royalty-free basis, forever. This decision was announced in April 1993, and sparked a global wave of creativity, collaboration, and innovation never seen before.”

On March 12, 2014 the web turned 25 years old. This past April 30th marked 23 years since CERN made the web public.

In the 20 years since going public, 3.2 billion people have come online–40% of the world’s population.

1.6 billion are on Facebook:

• Generating 4.5 billion “likes” every day
• Uploading 300 million photos every day
• Sharing 4.75 billion pieces of content every day

Every minute

• YouTube users upload 300 hours of video
• Netflix streams 80,000 hours of video
• 1 million Vine videos are viewed
• Instagram users “like” more than 1.7 million photos
• Apple users download 51,000 apps
• 571 new websites are launched every minute

We are all part of this online universe, which is expanding at incredible speed.

Google’s Eric Schmidt, once estimated the size of all this data at 500 million terabytes. And in Google’s first 7 years of indexing that data, they had only indexed 200 terabytes, or a mere .004 percent of the total.

Clearly the web universe is similar in its expansion to our physical universe. But what’s even more mind blowing is that all that data has physical weight.

Let’s start with that 500 million terabyte number. We know the average size of an email message is about 50 kilobytes. And since an electron weighs 2 x 10–30 pounds, and it takes about 8 billion electrons to store that email, we can derive the weight of that email at two tenths of a quadrillionth of an ounce.

Extend that number to the 500 million terabyte estimate and it equals 0.2 millionth of an ounce, or about the weight of a single grain of sand — a mere spec. But this spec contains most of all human knowledge and experiences we’ve ever recorded, and it continues to grow exponentially every second.

So thank you @timberners_lee for not only inventing the web but for releasing it free to the public. In just the 23 years since the world was given this gift, as we look at the history of all of human communication, it’s clear that we’ve only just begun to see its impact.

And, like Horton, we can help protect the web’s freedom for all, and participate in this rich and growing universe.

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