Just how much digital information is being created today? According to research firm IDC, 161 exabytes of information were created by individuals and businesses in 2006. Just in case you don’t know, an exabyte is one billion gigabytes worth of info. But that’s nothing compared to what’s coming: in the year 2010, just four years from today, IDC predicts that there will be 988 billion exabytes of data made, over six times the 2006 figure. That’s 57% growth per year, compounded, or put another way, a stack of books reaching from the Earth to the Sun, 93 million miles long – twelve times.

In 1996 about 48 million people were on this new thing called the internet. Ten years later, that number was up to 1.1 billion. By 2010, the same research company predicts that at least another half-a-billion individuals will be online, surfing, sending emails, photographs and sharing information with each other. This sort of explosive growth will present new challenges to corporations and people alike, and eventually new systems of sorting information based on its priority will have to come into play.

Last year alone 150 billion digital pictures were taken on cameras. You can add another 100 billion photos snapped by our cell phones. Over 1.6 billion email addresses are now out there, and we’re sending emails to each other at a rate three times faster than the total amount of addresses we can send them to. And by 2010 IDC predicts that 250 million instant messaging accounts will be in use and that 70% of all information generated will be made by individuals, not companies.