The Space Race

The story going around is there are 8 million blogs. I find this number hard to believe. Are we talking "real" blogs, or including every little webpage that someone set up and left alone?

Regardless, there are a huge number of blogs out there. Like any market, a small percentage get most of the readers and a large percentage very few. (I can't say exactly where in this range Pajama Guy falls, but now would be a nice time to take a station break and remind you that we (usually) provide daily content and cost nothing, so why not spread the word to your friends about this great deal?)

Unpopular blogs take up just as much storage room as popular ones. This is why the internet is so amazing. Imagine if everyone kept old-style journals instead of blogs. Forget how they'd find others to read them--the space required for storage alone would be bigger than most libraries. But because we're talking pixels, or electrons, or whatever (don't ask me, I just turn the key and it goes), we need virtually no storage space at all.

Virtually none, but that means, of course, some. Even an electron takes up space. Are there any physicists or engineers out there who can tell me how much physical space a novel's worth of blogging takes up? I'm not talking about the display on a computer, but the actual storage that the blog host handles. How much space is needed to store War And Peace or The Bible? An encyclopedia? All blogs combined?

PS After I wrote the above, I recalled there was a great thinker who asked the same sort of question before I was born. He even gave some answers. While he didn't have the technology then, he did have the imagination. Here's a link to Richard Feynman's speech "There's Plenty Of Room At The Bottom."