This week we were asked to review three websites one of which was CAIDA (The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) located at http://www.caida.org/home/. This site is a global Internet research firm and it was very impressive to browse through. I enjoyed reading their publications such as “Sustaining the Internet with Hyperbolic Mapping” and “Dialing privacy and utility: a proposed data-sharing framework to advance Internet research”, learning about the workshops and looking through some of their projects such as one titled “A Day in the Life of the Internet” which is a proposed community-wide experiment to capture a day in the life of the Internet. The CAIDA web site certainly lives up to its mission of promoting the engineering and maintenance of a robust, scalable Internet as well as illustrating just how far the Internet has come and how far it has spread.
Another site that was listed was the PEW Internet & American Life Project web site located at http://www.pewinternet.org/. This site is a national research project detailing many important aspects of Internet (and Internet related technologies) adoption and usage. The projects goal is to study the social impact of the Internet, focusing on a variety of topics including health, teens, the digital divide and broadband. I enjoyed perusing the topics and they were viewing them was pretty straightforward and were arranged by Activities and Pursuits, Demographics, and Technology and Media and were very easy to navigate. The Data Tools section was also interesting as it allowed you to view reports and get the latest statistics as well as look at survey results.
The third site that was listed detailed a study from UC Berkeley titled “How Much Information?” which is located at http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/. This study estimates the amount of new information that is created every year and shows that newly created information is accumulated in four areas of “physical media” which are print, film, magnetic and optical and can be observed or heard in four “information flows through electronic channels” which are telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet. While the study was released in 2003, the data was gathered in 2002 with the purpose being to approximate the annual size of the new data that was chronicled in media storage each year in information flows. The information that was collected was compared to an earlier study that took place in 2000 in order to illustrate trends in the growth rate of information. In reading this study, it is readily apparent how much information is available to users and the importance of organization. While the study was quite detailed and technical in nature, it is very helpful and illuminating and is something that should be given attention.