Weighing the Internet

the-dark-kangaroo writes "Jason Striegel has taken Physics to a new dimension by 'Weighing the Internet.' Well, actually calculating the total number of users online in one day. The conclusion that was reached was that there are ~519 million users per day online. Also, 'From what we calculated, it would appear that roughly 41 percent of internet users did not log in that day.'"

Comments

Technique

[Azadre]

What algorithim did they use? The one involving magic?

Weight:

[wot.narg]

The awswer is 42 (metric gigatons total).

Breakdown of Internet Weight:

10 gigatons of Flames.
20 gigatons of Spam.
10 gigatons of e-dicks.
2 gigatons of information.

Continues on...

[XFilesFMDS1013]

Jason Striegel continued by saying that "we didn't count anyone from Slashdot, because, lets face it, sitting in front of your computer all day eating Doritos tends to skew the results".

what the hell

[hobotron]

Horrible Horrible "study".

"So we can figure out the number of people who view hackaday by dividing 72,500 by 1.4, which gives us roughly 51,800 daily viewers."

Wrong. Bad sample population, low sample size with ONE DAY, NO inclusion of error propagation across statistical barriers. When you multiply estimates, you multiply error as well.

"With this knowlege, you can easily estimate the traffic to other sites. If we go by the 471 million estimate, Slashdot gets a whopping 380,000 daily readers."

Pretty sure I F5 more than that.

"Alexa... Alexa... Alexa...etc."

I dont know about you but Alexa is bordering on adware with this. Call me paranoid, I dont care.

Also not everyone (like me) would sign up and run a dumb banner like this on their browser, so your sample excluedes pretty much everyone that got hit with the smarts bat growing up.

Perhaps im missing some gross humorous overtone, but mod article -1 Statistical Chicanery

Re:what?

[fr1kk]

See, when I read "weight of the internet" I thought it was talking about Physical Weight. It'd be sweeter if you took all the bandwidth data divided it by the speed of light (or whatever), and came up with the weight of the individual electrons of data at any given moment. Now THAT would be "taking Physics to a new dimension"!