As I've said, the most mind-boggling thing about this whole exercise is the sheer scope of blogging. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, hundreds of millions, maybe billions of words. Today alone I will write about 10,000 words in this weblog. The volume of the blogosphere is enough to alphabetically suffocate the brain (that's right, alpha-bytes). Just imagine sitting in front of Weblogs.com all day, with its up-to-the-minute listing of recently updated blogs, and reading everything that is posted. It's a recipe for insanity. That we can make any sense of all of this sea is staggering.

This question of the volume of information in a digital age reminds me of an intriguing piece in the Washington Post a couple years ago on the Library of Congress and its struggle to cope with the mass of data being force-fed down its throat. In some cases preservation or mere retention of data means converting from some delicate physical storage to digital bytes. The mass seems to be too much for the maw.

I fished out the file and put it up at my file site:

...2002_07_21_nbiermafile_archive.html#79349894