The Internet is a mysterious thing. We all use it, but what makes a website, really? Obviously, some of us know more about this than others. Still, this is the question asked and answered by the company Broadband Choices, in this infographic. The graphic provides statistics like how much data is on the Internet, from less than half a trillion gigabytes in 2005, to more than one trillion gigabytes in 2010, and a projected leap to nearly eight trillion gigabytes by 2015. So, if you’ve ever wondered what exactly is that Internet thing anyway, here is your answer.

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego everybody’s data? Well, Mozy’s Where oh Where is the World’s Data Being Stored? infographic can tell you and no, its not a big .jpg that just says “TEH CLOUD LOLZ,” although that might not be entirely inaccurate. The infographic provides a nice little breakdown of how much data is probably out there, where the biggest data centers are and how all that data is stored. Spoiler: some of it is still stored by digital tape. Check out the full infographic after the jump, and start backing up your digital tapes, Zip disks and 3.5 inch floppies.

Thanks to the remixing skills of Dan Bull, Data’s poem “Ode to Spot” from Star Trek: The Next Generation has been transformed into a tight hip-hop track. Yes, it has been done before, but this is the best version yet.

(via Topless Robot | MP3 download link)

Here’s a new holiday we can get behind: As a protective measure against April Fools’ Day pranks gone awry and as a matter of generally good computer hygiene, March 31st has been decreed World Backup Day by Redditors and the women, men, and narwhals that love them. Regularly backing up data may be common practice for some tech-minded individuals, but for many laptop-toting civilians, it isn’t — and the results can be disastrous. At some point, you or someone you know has probably experienced the pain of a term paper gobbled up by corrupted data, and it’s alarmingly common for an entire hard drive to fail.

As World Backup Day’s organizers point out, the hard drive is the component of the computer most likely to break unexpectedly: Brand new hard drives fail at a rate of three percent per year, and it only gets worse as time goes on. And this is to say nothing of users’ potential to accidentally inflict harm on their own data with viruses and malware.

What to do? External drives, USB sticks, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs offer relatively painless IRL data backup, and online backup on the cloud may be even cheaper and more secure. More info about the pros and cons of each method on the World Backup Day website.

(World Backup Day website | Thanks, pinwale.)

In a story ripped from the headlines, blogger Matthew Belinkie from Overthinking It has released a comprehensive review of the success/failure rate from the first 10 seasons of Law & Order. Far from being mere fan fodder for those that wiled away so much of their lives on the series, Belinkie has some startling observations to make about the show and the city that spawned it.

First up: the basics. The chart above breaks down the guilty/not guilty/plea/other outcomes of each episode. Right away you can see a steady progression of success followed by a sharp decline and equally sharp rise in success over the first five seasons.

The success rate started high, went higher, and then plummeted to a bleak 59% in the 1993 season. That means in 2 out of every 5 episodes that year, the bad guy got away with it.

What Belinke does next is add some cultural context to those stats, with surprising results.

We’re unabashed data geeks, so this four-minute presentation by health professor and statistician Hans Rosling on 120,000 pieces of human data worldwide over the past 200 years may have been more exciting to us than it should have been. But it’s helped by the nifty AR display and Rosling’s genuinely excited, sports announcer-like tone.

Rosling is Professor of Global Health at Stockholm’s prestigious Karolinska Institute and founder of the Gapminder Foundation. He’s a man who revels in the glorious nerdery of stats – and in The Joy of Stats he entertainingly explores the history of statistics, how statistics works mathematically, and how with statistics we can take the massive deluge of data of today’s computer age and use it to see the world as it really is – not just as we imagine it to be.

Rosling’s famous lectures use enormous quantities of public data to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development.

(BBC via BoYT)

Recently, a number of cable companies have been dropping hints about offering cellphone / wireless Internet service. So far they’ve just been baby steps, with a small test rollout here, or a limited test deployment there. But thus far, none of the CableCos really have much to show for all their talk.

But the cable companies need to think bigger, much bigger: If they do, both you and they will end up winners. Here’s why:

Flickrer and infographic maven stevefaeembra has come up with a nifty graphical representation for the world’s most common flag colors by country.

Naturally, it involves a geeky, techy workaround: he went over all of the large flag images in the CIA World Factbook with a Python script, which tallied the number of pixels of each color.

Full-sized graphic after the jump:

Custom labeling outfit MaverickLabel has put together this fascinating infographic summing up employee theft statistics in America. The quick takeaway: there’s more theft by employees than ever before (close to a trillion dollars in 2008, if these numbers are to be believed!), men are likelier to be thieves than women, and more educated workers don’t necessarily steal more, but if they do, they’re likely to take a ton.

Full graphic after the jump: