I like the word “ephemeral”.

Ephemeral things, like butterflies or sunsets, exist for only a while and then are gone for ever. Printed stuff like tickets, posters, newspapers and monogrammed bog rolls are all forms of ephemera – fleeting things that serve their purpose and are then discarded, forgotten.

And I suppose online artefacts such as this blog are in many ways even more ephemeral than their printed predecessors. This blog doesn’t really exist except as a bunch of bits and bytes on a server somewhere – you can cut and paste it or print it out if you wish but that’s not quite the same thing.

But when you think about it, all this online stuff may not be as ephemeral as you would like. All those emails and text messages which you think have been deleted seem to be easily retrievable as evidence when it comes to court cases and prosecutions.

Where they actually are is anyone’s guess but the fact remains that they just don’t seem to want to go away. In fact many lawyers regard all this “hidden” data as being very similar to a chamber full of radioactive isotopes – due to the fact that it’s extremely toxic and takes ages to decompose.

There’s no getting away from the fact that there are tons and tons of cyberstuff clogging up cyberspace, most of which never really existed in the traditional sense and most of which will probably never be accessed again.

A recent report from market analysts International Data Corporation states that by 2010 there will be 988 exabytes (which is just under a zettabyte) in all computer storage worldwide. This apparently is the equivalent of three million times all the information in all the books ever written, or the same as a stack of books reaching as far as the sun.

A zettabyte, by the way, is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one sextillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or one long scale trilliard) bytes. There is also something called a yottabyte which is even bigger than a zettabyte.

What I don't understand though is why, at the smaller end of the scale, there are 8 bits to 1 byte. How did that escape decimalisation?

Another thing I don't understand is, why I am even attempting to write about a subject of which I know nothing? Surely it would be better left to scientific experts such as Stephen Hawking or that brainy looking guy in the straw hat whose blog is next to mine?

I mean, yogotta believe they have a lottabytes more brainpower than me.