We recently completed another major “How Much Information?” report. This one measures how much information servers processed, worldwide.  Answer: we estimated 9.57 ZB in 2008. The coverage was broad, although not as much general press as our previous report on information consumption. I was impressed to see us reach 130,000 Google hits in a few days (try searching on the string 9570000000000000000000 ), until I realized that most of them are spam sites – they just duplicate hot items in hopes that Google will point to them, instead of the original.

As always, we had to make a lot of judgment calls in deciding what to measure and how. See the report, and the forthcoming technical appendix.

The report is available here.