Information Overload: New Study Finds Data increasing

"There is twice as much new information in the world as there was just three years ago -- and most of it isn't very interesting. The researchers concluded that the amount of new information produced last year was about 23 exabytes. An exabyte is a million terabytes. A terabyte is a million megabytes -- roughly equivalent to the content of a million books." (from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
There's a whole lot of boring information out there)

The original Berkeley report "How Much Information? 2003" has a section dedicated to Internet and Web that is quite interesting. It agregates a lot of other research and provides some interesting statistics. For example, they estimate the total size of the surface web as 167 TB. There are also stats on Blogs, Spam, Instant Messaging, and Peer to Peer networking.

See also:
- The Register: US outguzzles world+dog in paper, bandwidth consumption in which they comment "it should come as no shock that EMC, HP, Intel and Microsoft 'supported' the study"
- Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics