Information explosion

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

The information explosion is the rapid increase in the amount of published information and the effects of this abundance of data. As the amount of available data grows, the problem of managing the information becomes more difficult, which can lead to information overload. The Online Oxford English Dictionary[1] indicates use of the phrase in a March 1964 New Statesman article. The New York Times first used the phrase in its editorial content in an article by Walter Sullivan on June 7, 1964 in which he described the phrase as “much discussed.” (pE11.) The earliest use of the phrase seems to have been in an IBM advertising supplement to the New York Times published on April 30, 1961 and by Frank Fremont-Smith, Director of the American Institute of Biological Sciences Interdisciplinary Conference Program, in an April 1961 article in the AIBS Bulletin (p. 18.)

Fortunately, techniques to gather knowledge from an overabundance of electronic information (e.g., data fusion may help in data mining) have existed since the 1970s.

Contents

[edit] Web servers

As of August 2005, there were over 70 million web servers.[2] As of September 2007 there were over 135 million web servers.[3]

[edit] Blogs

According to Technorati, the number of blogs doubles about every 6 months with a total of 35.3 million blogs as of April 2006.[4]This is an example of the early stages of logistic growth, where growth is approximately exponential, since blogs are a recent innovation. As the number of blogs approaches the number of possible producers (humans), saturation occurs, growth declines, and the number of blogs eventually stabilizes.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ “Information.” http://dictionary.oed.com. accessed January 4, 2008
  2. ^ Robert H Zakon (15 December 2010). "Hobbes' Internet Timeline 10.1". zakon.org. http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/. Retrieved 27 August 2011. 
  3. ^ "August 2011 Web Server Survey". netcraft.com. August 2011. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html. Retrieved 27 August 2011. 
  4. ^ "State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth". Sifry's Alerts (sifry.com). April 17, 2006. http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000432.html. Retrieved 27 August 2011. 

[edit] External links

Personal tools
Namespaces
Variants
Actions
Navigation
Interaction
Toolbox
Print/export
Languages