It’s Web Wednesday! Every Wednesday we’re going to share a blog post celebrating the wonderful world of the web.

This week it’s 10 of our favourite facts about the Internet.

1. 2.4 billion people use the Internet – 34% of the world’s population. There’s been a massive 566% growth in the last decade in the number of global Internet users. Seventy-eight per cent of North Americans are Internet users, while only 15% of people in Africa are online.

2. The weight of all information on the Internet has been estimated at 0.2 millionths of an ounce, or the same weight as a grain of sand. Pretty mind-boggling, isn’ it?

3. The world’s first website was launched in 1991 at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) with the URL Info.cern.ch. In 1993 CERN made World Wide Web technology available on a royalty-free basis, which was the start of the Internet as we know it. In 2013, to mark the anniversary of the publication of the document that made web technology free for everyone to use, CERN started a project to restore the first website and to preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web.

4. If you wanted to copy the entire Internet to disc, you would have to use more than one billion DVDs or 200 million Blu-Ray discs.

5. Social media has taken over! With 17% of the world’s population (and half of the world’s Internet users) on Facebook, the site receives 500 terabytes of data every day. Seventy-two hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, there are 102 million blogs on Tumblr, and a billion tweets are sent every five days.

6. Every month there are more than 100 billion searches on Google.

7. The first message ever relayed over the Internet in 1969 was supposed to be ‘LOGIN’ but there was a crash and only ‘LOG’ was completed.

8. More than 80% of all emails are spam, and up to 40% of all accounts and 8% of all messages on social media sites are created by spammers. As much as 80% of all spam in Europe and North America can be traced back to only 200 spammers.

9. The first webcam was used to monitor a pot of coffee at Cambridge University.

10. Research has shown that a third of all Internet searches are related to pornography. More than half of all the photos on the web are of naked women, and at any given time, it’s estimated that almost 30 000 people are watching X-rated videos.

 

Do you have an interesting fact about the internet to share?

Comments
  • Harvey Specter
    Posted at 15:04 May 15, 2013
    Nick McCreath
    Author

    Point number 2:The weight of all information on the Internet has been estimated at 0.2 millionths of an ounce, or the same weight as a grain of sand. Pretty mind-boggling, isn’ it?

    Not sure if I understand that, mind explaining?

    • Harvey Specter
      Posted at 16:34 May 17, 2013
      Sarah Duff
      Author

      Hi Nick, good question. I find it hard to understand myself (being a non-sciencey person) but here’s a complex explanation that you may be able to get better than I do:
      While the original DARPA net was built like a tank to survive a thermonuclear holocaust , much post-modern net construction is utterly gossamer, all air and microwaves. But those channels lead to boxes full of integrated circuits bearing labels that specify how much power they can handle, and solid state physics reveals what fraction of the silicon inside is abuzz with electrons in motion , and how much sits idle. In short, you can do the math.
      A statistically rough ( one sigma) estimate might be 75-100 million servers @ ~350-550 watts each. Call it Forty Billion Watts or ~ 40 GW. Silicon logic runs at three volts or so, and as the electron’s mass is 9.1 x ten to the minus 31 grams, an Ampere is some ten to the eighteenth electrons a second, and the average chip runs at a Gigaherz , fairly straightforward calculation reveals that some 50 grams of electrons in motion make up the Internet.
      Applying the unreasonable power of dimensional analysis to the small tonnage of silicon involved yields much the same answer. The flip side of Moore’s Law is that as etched circuitry shrinks , the transistors within the silicon pizzas chip foundries produce end up weighing next to nothing. State-of-the-art 100 nanometer transistors run a million trillion to a ton . So as of today, cyberspace weighs less than two ounces.
      It’s hard to be more exact ,since devices vary in speed, but to get a handle on The Whole Web instead of just the suburbs we’re wired to , try tripling that figure-there are maybe ten times more mostly idle CPU chips in PC’s than servers, and fewer very busy ones in the world’s comparative handful of supercomputers .
      Each person alive today has six watts of computational power at the disposal of their twenty watt brain . Third Worlders have trouble accessing claim their six watt share of the worlds computing horsepower , but wired Americans or Japanese expend more energy on surfing than thinking.Yet the net has more than electrons inside– a lot of its wire and fiber optic infrastructure is shared.. Some cables crackle with live TV bandwidth while others slumber– the mix of traffic is unpredictable , and cable trunks branch like trees.
      It is easy to put a tape measure to this shaggy creature’s backbone, but the length of its hairy nervous system is hard to guess at . It may take a staggering four miles of copper wire to connect the average US home to optical broadband . With copper at three dollars a pound , that 25 pound wire to optical cable link makes ultratransparent glass fiber a staggering bargain at ten times its weight in gold–it does the work of a billion times its weight in copper. Its almost infinite bandwidth has pared the web down to run impressively well on ten nanograms of electrons per netizen, a figure optical computing may alter little , for it takes electrons to make photons.
      Just as well- if the net ran on recycled light , it would be weightless as an IP lawyer’s word. As matters stand , it takes a lot of force to horse those critical 50 grams of electrons around. This message was brought to you by a few nanograms of electrons, but when rush hour users race their silicon engines , fifty million horsepower is unleashed on the information superhighway. But hold your horses- that power bill ain’t hay, and silicon foundries are devising ways to cut it down to size- a 68 watt server chip is in the works.
      But what about quantum computation ? Though its future is dazzling , it may take a whie to accelerate into it . Singularity fans need to think about delay s due to restarting the clock on Moore’s Law. (from here:http://adamant.typepad.com/sei….
      This video explains it a bit more clearly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v… (although it’s a bit outdated, because people used to think that the internet weighed the same as a strawberry, and now it’s thought to weigh the same as a grain of sand).
      Hope that helps!

  • Harvey Specter
    Posted at 16:32 May 17, 2013
    Jeremy Wilkinson
    Author

    What was the first website launched in South Africa?

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