Most of us rely on Wikipedia for step-in level information on all kinds of topics, several times a day, from our computers and smart phones. Wikipedia is free of commercial messages. Wikipedia does not charge you money.
But Wikipedia cannot run on air.
Read this message from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and consider donating a few dollars per year.
British Creative Review writes about an installation by Erik Kessels on display at Foam in Amsterdam. Kessels has printed out the amount of photos that are uploaded to Flickr during 24 hours, allegedly 1 million photos.
Creative Review writes: <<“We’re exposed to an overload of images nowadays,” says Kessels. “This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and un-selfconsciously displayed […] >>
What is most interesting about Kessels installation is that it turns this abstract number into something very concrete, that you can relate to physically: several rooms with piles of photos covering floor and walls. That gets a different message though compared to the old million-billion-trillion rant.
Speaking of which, here are some more interesting figures about photos on the internet:
5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010).
3000+ – Photos uploaded per minute to Flickr.
130 million – At the above rate, the number of photos uploaded per month to Flickr.
3+ billion – Photos uploaded per month to Facebook.
36 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.
(Source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/ )
The article in Creative Review, with photos (!) showing the massive amounts of photo print-outs in the installation:
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2011/november/24-hours-in-photos
This installation by Erik Kessels is on show as part of an exhibition at Foam in Amsterdam that looks at the future of photography. It features print-outs of all the images uploaded to Flickr in a 24-hour period…
We all have our personal, inner conception or mental map of the Internet: which are the important places, where can you find what you are looking for, what are people doing when using the web and so on.
It is safe to say that each of us has a false image – or at least a very far from complete image. We are guided by habit, hazard and home: you are socialized IRL into the understanding and inner image you have of what there is and what is going on – on the world wide web.
Let’s stop for a minute and rethink this. Imagine you heard about the WWW for the first time just now. Someone tells you that it is a network that thousands of millions of people fill with text, images and video 24-7. And searching that content works pretty good thanks to various tools at hand.
If you were to take in that information and assess the possibilities offered by such a source, would you then not want to get a birds-eye view of where the users are hanging out? Which parts of this network that see a lot of activity, that get a lot of attention from the users? Think of it like looking up the number of book volumes in the different topic departments of a library – it is useful to know where there are a lot of sources, and where there are fewer.
Whether you agree or not, here is where you can check out which the top 100, top 1000 and top 1 000 000 websites are based on number of visitors during a month (visitors from the United States):
http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites
As the numbers will tell you, the top 3 sites generate on average 10 times more visitors than sites ranked 101-103, which gives a hint that the distribution of visitors follow a Power Law curve:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
One point to consider is also that there is a world outside of the United States, which means that the list would likely change considerably if internet users in India and China were also measured.
So, where people are going when using the Internet is one thing – but there is more. Royal Pingdom tells you how many the user are, how much content they consume, how much content they create etc etc…
http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/
http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/01/16/internet-2012-in-numbers/
During the weekend of September 30 – October 2, the DerbyCon took place in Louisville, Kentucky, at the Hyatt Regency hotel. During those three days, a number of extremely skilled and knowledgeable speakers presented on different topics in three parallel tracks. All the presentations were video recorded and are now available online.
There is a very high likelihood that you will learn valuable things from watching these videos, either from an information security standpoint, or from an open source intelligence standpoint.
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/derbycon1/mainlist
http://www.derbycon.com/
iOSINT - information on Open Source Intelligence 