A lot of information

Nobody really knows how much information there is in the world. According to one extremely rough estimate, if you took every book, newspaper, magazine, TV and radio programme, every music album, every handwritten letter, every filed-away document and every other piece of recorded data in existence, and you stored them all on computer hard drives, the amount of disk space you would need would be somewhere in the region of 2,100 exabytes, or 2,100bn gigabytes. If it helps - and it probably doesn't - this is more than 100m times the amount of data that is thought to be stored, in print form, in the bookstacks of the world's largest library, the Library of Congress in Washington.

Oliver Burkemann in connection with the project of putting the entire Guardian and Observer archive online. Where is this work being done? In Tel Aviv, obviously. (Via Linda at The Dresser - and see also her obituary today for a 'brave and passionate woman'.)