Too much data man!

Wired Magazine reports a study by the IDC research firm:

...determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes - 161 exabytes - of digital information last year.

That's like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. Or you might think of it as 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. You'd need more than 2 billion of the most capacious iPods on the market to get 161 exabytes.

... IDC estimates that by 2010, about 70 percent of the world's digital data will be created by individuals.

...the study has intriguing implications. Among them: We'll need better technologies to help secure, parse, find and recover usable material in this universe of data.

And presumably, people to assist others in navigating all this data and these technologies. People like librarians.