My feeling of technogeek euphoria that I got last month when Google doubled the size of their index has quickly evaporated as I perused Berkeley's "How Much Information" study. Here's some stats that will blow you away:

• The World Wide Web contains 167 terabytes of Web pages on its "surface" (i.e. fixed web pages); in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections. Plus another 91,850 terabytes of data in the "deep web" (from database driven websites that create web pages on demand)
• Email generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.
• The amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years.
• Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks. Five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections.

What I found even more amazing (and depressing) is the degree to which we consume this data. We are a society of
information junkies. Witness this from the same report:

Published studies on media use say that the average American adult uses the telephone 16.17 hours a month, listens to radio 90 hours a month, and watches TV 131 hours a month. About 53% of the U.S. population uses the Internet, averaging 25 hours and 25 minutes a month at home, and 74 hours and 26 minutes a month at work — about 13% of the time.

I can't imagine sitting in front of the 'idiot box' for 131 hours a month. What a terrible waste of one's life. For an average person, that's something like 7 years of your life — gone.

Dave of the excellent PassingNotes.com blog looks at it this way:

IF you were all of those things, then of the 720 average hours in a given month, of which you should be sleeping circa 200 (give or take a few hundred), then you'd basically be occupied by media (in some form) for over 330 hours per month - and since we spend about one-third of our lives 'waiting for something to happen' (bus, phone etc) and about another 20-40 hours per month in a bathroom (much higher for ted kennedy), then discount sleep, and you've got about 80ish hours to be a genuine, sentient human being...sad, sad world...

If you haven't heard about RSS yet, you need to check it out! RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a standard designed for syndicating headlines and other web content to other websites. It has evolved into a popular means for individuals to keep up with the latest articles and musings across favorite websites — using RSS newsreader software (which is starting to get built into web browsers and email clients). RSS is widely used in blogs (including this one — just check the RSS link on the bottom right column) and on news sites such as the BBC and CNN.

RSS, in my opinion, has the power to turn email marketing on its head. RSS represents a separate web-delivered channel that, quite unlike email, is impossible to spam. If the subscriber doesn't add your RSS feed to his or her newsreader software or web-based news aggregator (like My Yahoo!), then you can't break through to him or her. What a brilliant idea! I think it's inevitable that most newsletters and promotional content will eventually be delivered through RSS feeds rather than to our email in-boxes. The overload of spam is driving many consumers to RSS as a secure and unspamable way of getting news and commentary. And, as David Sklar opines, RSS will hopefully become the standard for companies to actually conduct real business with their customers. David is spot-on when he calls RSS the "ultimate opt-in."

Today I had the pleasure to hear web content guru Gerry McGovern speak at a full-day workshop in Wellington, New Zealand. He's got to be one of the very best speakers I've ever heard! His course material, his sense of humor, his thought-provoking insights, and especially his Irish accent — had everyone in the audience mesmerized. Here's a sampling of the day's take-aways:

• Action vs. reaction: If a site visitor's action results in a reaction from your web site that has a wait time exceeding that of the action, the visitor will become frustrated. That frustration will build as more . For example, clicking on the File menu tab only takes a second, so the time it takes for the menubar to appear underneath should take no more than a second.
• 80/20 rule of content: For many sites, less than 20% of the site content accounts for over 80% of the pageviews. With Microsoft.com it was 1% of their content accounted for 99% of the pageviews. In fact, 35% of their pages had never been viewed! That's well over a million pages of content that people at Microsoft worked hard to write ? for nothing. Focus your efforts on the copy that will be read, not on the copy that won't.
• Columns: Readers use their peripheral vision to keep track of the beginning of the next line down while they are reading across a line. So with text that has a long linewidth, it becomes difficult to read. Gerry recommends a three column format, with 20% or so of the width going to the first column (use this column for navigation), 60% or so dedicated to the middle column, and another 20% or so for the right hand column.
• Call for action: Always end your pages with a clear action for the reader to take. Never leave the reader hanging, wondering what to do next. The center column at the end of the body copy is a critical piece of real estate for these calls for action.
• Links in copy: According to Gerry, links in the middle of body copy distracts the readers making it difficult for them to read the paragraph, and it connotes "hey, click on me... the rest of this text is really boring!" Instead of embedding links within the body copy, consider using the right hand column for the related links. If there are important links there that take the reader to the "next step," also repeat them at underneath the body copy in the center column.
• Simplicity: Einstein purportedly was quoted as saying "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." Apply this idea to your web copy. Keep your copy as short and simple as possible. People tend not to read long copy on the web. With a 300 word page, 50% will read it to the end; 500 words, 20%; 1000 words, 5%. Gerry recommends headings of 4 to 8 words, summaries of 30 to 50 words, sentences of 15 to 20 words, and paragraphs of 40 to 70 words.
• "Kill your darlings": William Faulkner once said this. If there's a particular expression or way of saying something that you're particularly fond of, delete it from your copy, because you're probably overusing it.

Gerry covered so much more than this, but it would take a book to cover it all. Oh, wait a minute... there is a book covering it all. Buy Gerry's book, Content Critical.

Most web copy has no soul... it's mostly just personality-less drivel. Nick Usborne makes a great point in Net Words about how most newsletter subscription confirmations seem to be written by the same personality-less person and how a company's personality that comes through from the copy is the ONE differentiator that can't be easily ripped off (unlike the design, the offers, etc.)

In my long quest to find a FAQ or Help page that actually has personality, I've finally found one! From the ultra-clever folks at Mailinator. Have a peruse of Mailinator's FAQ. Here's an excerpt:

So if the government issued a subpeona to Mailinator to divulge emails or logs, you'd rat me out?

Holy crap, yes. I'm not going to jail for you, I have a boyish face and very (very) supple skin.