- The technology behind the Internet began back in the 1960s at MIT. The first message ever to be transmitted was LOG… The user had attempted to type LOGIN, but the network crashed after the enormous load of data of the letter G.
- The first webcam was deployed at Cambridge University – its purpose was to monitor a coffee maker, avoiding wasted trips to an empty pot.
- The computer in your cell phone is a million times cheaper, a thousand times more powerful, and a hundred thousand times smaller than the one computer at MIT in 1965. What used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in the years to come.
- Although the MP3 filetype was invented in 1991, it wouldn’t be until 1998 that the first music file-sharing service, Napster, would go live and change the way the Internet was used forever.
- 247 billion emails are sent every day. That’s 90 Trillion every year. 81% are Spam.
- According to the Internet Society, the term “Spam” is derived from the 1970 spam sketch of the BBC television comedy series “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”, set in a cafe where every menu item includes Spam canned luncheon meat. As the waiter recites the menu, a chorus of Vikings drown out all conversations with a song repeating “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam… Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!”, hence “Spamming” the dialogue. Then in the early 1980s, companies that bulked-mailed unsolicited advertising material referred to it as “SPAM” – “Sales-Promotion-And-Marketing”… otherwise known as “Stupid-Pointless-Annoying-Messages”.
- The first-ever YouTube video was uploaded on April 23rd, 2005, and was a boring 18 seconds long, entitled “Me at the Zoo”.
- One in five of the world’s Internet users visit YouTube every day.
- 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s comparable to Hollywood releasing 86,000 new films every week. Over 12 Billion videos are viewed each month on YouTube.
- In North America, 70 out of 100 people surf the Internet….and the numbers are growing. Americans make out 76.2% of the world’s Internet-Population.
- Google estimates the internet at about 5 million terabytes of data. That is 5 billion gigabytes or 5 trillion megabytes. Google claims it has only indexed a paltry .04% of it all!
- The human brain can hold an estimated 1 to 10 terabytes of information. Using an average of 5 billion terabytes per brain, it would take one million human brains to store the internet. You could fit the whole Internet on 200 million Blu-Ray disks.
- According to Cyber Atlas, it took just 5 years for the Internet to reach 50 million users. This same milestone took television 13 years and took radio 38 years.
- 10 million people are watching ABC, NBC, and CBS collectively every month. These businesses have been around for a combined 200 years. Yet 250 million people are going to YouTube, Facebook and MySpace collectively every month …..and none of these sites even existed 6 years ago.
- More video was uploaded to YouTube in the last 2 months than if ABC, NBC, and CBS have been airing new content 24/7/365 since 1948.
- Social networking is the fastest-growing part of the Internet. There are 70 million active users on Facebook, and more than 14 million photos are uploaded daily.
- Technorati tracks over 133 million blogs on the Internet.
- Nielsen Net Ratings indicates that the average Internet user will, in one month, spend 25 hours, visiting 59 domains / viewing 1,050 pages.
- Americans has access to 1,000,000,000,000 web pages and 65,000 iPhone apps. And yet we have only 10,500 radio stations, 5500 magazines, and approximately 200 cable TV networks. In the past 5 years, newspapers are down 18.7%, magazines down 14.8%, radio down 11.7%, and TV down 10.1%.
- According to ComStore, in 2008, the United States spent $214.4 billion online. Internet purchasing is increasing at a rate of 7% per year.
Resources: www.makeuseof.com www.jelecos.com www.labnol.org