How big is the internet?

Since I drink a lot of caffeine I lay awake sometimes thinking about stuff like, “How big is the internet?” I also wonder who is liked more Captain Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard. It turns out these are related questions.

The internet is nothing more than a bunch of blogs, websites, comments, videos, news items, podcasts, music, and now tweets. I am going to call the bunch of things occurrences.  The internet changes day by day, minute by minute, and probably second by second. New things appear like tweets that did not even exist a year ago.

So how many occurrences are there on the internet that mention or discuss Jean-Luc Picard v. Captain Kirk.   The number of occurrences does not equate to good.  It is the difference between famous and infamous or fame and infamy.  In other words popularity does not mean good.

A simple google search yielded 800,000 occurrences of Jean-Luc and 1.5 million occurrences for Captain Kirk.    Not everything said about Captain Kirk is kind.  Say it ain’t so because some people think that Captain Kirk sucks.   On the other hand some people think that Jean-Luc Picard is a sex symbol.  An occurrence can be good or bad.

I found the following occurrence of a question and answer between two people very interesting.  It is about Jean-Luc Picard.

Question
“I am not after a man, I’m a straight male.  I’m simply wondering if shaving my hair off and wandering around in a burgundy jumpsuit using stock phrases such as ‘engage’ and ‘make it so’ would impress the ladies.”

Answer
“Jean-Luc Picard is sex on legs and you will be too, when you shave your head and get a burgundy jumpsuit.  You will NEVER EVER want for a first mate again as the ladies will be very willing to be part of your fleet.  Engage and make it so!”

In my quest to measure the internet, I have my first conclusion.  Anything that happens on the internet is an occurrence.  An occurrence be good or bad.  Fame is good and Infamy is bad.  Andy Warhol said, “Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes in the future.”  I think he meant that everyone will be famous or infamous for 15 minutes.  Just ask Miss South Carolina the difference.  With over 35 million Youtube views and over five million other occurences on the internet  she understands the difference.

How big is the internet?  The real question is how do you measure the internet and how do you measure social media.  It turns out these are all the same question.

Links

What is Social Media

Reboot! Some Metrics

Since publishing my online book  Reboot! Rethinking and Restarting Software Development in earlier February 2009 there has been 35,000 pages read by 4,000 different visitors in 101 different countries.

The USA and India had the most visitors with about 1,000 visitors each followed by United Kingdom (250) and Canada (153).  What I find interesting are not the number of readers from countries known for software development, but the readers from countries such as Nepal, Moldova, or Zambia.   There were even a few readers from the Cayman Islands.  They need to step away from the laptop and get back to the beach!