The lore of large numbers…
The folks at Pingdom pay pretty close attention to the Net. Now, in “Internet 2009 in Numbers,” they share back what they’ve learned.
For example:
– 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
– 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
– 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
– 100 million – New email users since the year before.
– 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
– 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
– 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
– 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).
There’s more– in a way that’s amusingly resonant with their subject, much, much more– here. As the folks at Pingdom suggest, “prepare for information overload… but in a good way.”
As we reset our spam filters, we might recall that it was on this date in 1919 that The Paris Peace Conference, convened to build a lasting peace after World War I, approved the proposal to create the League of Nations. A centerpiece of Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points for Peace,” the organization was meant to provide “mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”
The League was liquidated in 1946, at the end of the global conflagration– World War II– it was meant to prevent; it was effectively replaced by the United Nations, which took over many of the League’s agencies and functions.
