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If you think there's a lot of demand for data storage now, you better brace yourself. According to projections pulled together by CenturyLink, we're in for a deluge of big data. By 2015, CenturyLink says that we'll see a four-fold increase in data being created and replicated.

This year, CenturyLink projects that 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created. By 2015, the projection is 7.9 zettabytes. That's the equivalent of 18 million times the digital assets stored by the Library of Congress today.

Fans of Paul Newman will recognize his character's famous line in Cool Hand Luke. Never in the history of electronic communications do we have so many choices and yet experience so many communication failures. This was made clear to me recently when I tried to get in touch with a "friend" of mine. I put the word in quotes because I mean it in Facebook terms: someone that I may or may not have met f2f, but want to stay in touch. Let's call this friend Bob for simplicity.

The days of speculating on Internet domain names have been with us almost as long as when one could first purchase a .COM back in the middle 1990s. But is there any way to really quantify things to figure out whether you are better off with a particular suffix? Given that the gTLD space (as these are called) is about to widen considerably, it is a good time to ask this question.

So let's say you can't afford the six-figure deal to buy your own gTLD, like .strom in my case. If you are going old school, is it better to go with a .COM, .NET, .ORG or one of the newer ones such as .MOBI or .TV? There is a service that can provide some insights.

If you've been living under an Internet-free rock the past couple of weeks, you might have managed to miss the steady drumbeat of opposition to HR 3261, the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Then again, if you've been living under an Internet-free rock, you've already had a preview of what we're facing if SOPA goes into effect.

I'm exaggerating a little, but not by much. We've covered SOPA earlier this week and the EFF's efforts to rally opposition to the bill. But today is American Censorship Day and a hearing for the bill in the U.S. House that's stacked in favor of the bill.

Back when kids played outdoors in playgrounds, there was some taunt about acting your age not your shoe size. Well, IBM has managed to figure out that the median shoe heel height for women has been dropping for the fashion conscious, quite precipitately it seems over the past couple of years. IBM based its conclusions on tens of thousands of blog posts and other social media references about shoe discussions. They looked for the key footwear influencers, those who were passionate about their shoes and had large social followings online. So the median height has gone from an incredible seven inches in 2009 down to two this year.

Cisco today unveiled new versions of its popular WebEx and Jabber communications tools at its customer conference in Miami. There are new features, beefed up mobile clients, and a better experience for the low-end users with free versions too. With today's announcements, Cisco is finally pulling together the various pieces of technology that it purchased several years ago, and offering a compelling reason to look closer at its offerings.

Global Village, a phrase we use so frequently these days, was coined by the media expert, Marshall McLuhan. It seemed like the perfect phrase to describe the world created by a growing body of interconnected online users of the time. From "global village" emerged the phrase "global citizens," used to describe people who think, behave and act in similar ways. Experts like McLuhan and Alvin Toffler ushered in the era with descriptors that seemed to fit perfectly - "Future Shock" and "Future Arriving Yesterday," among others.

Logically, interconnectedness should only grow with time, creating a form of intense, almost bland, homogeneity. However, recent online trends, including search engines like Google and social networks like Facebook seem to have broken the global village down into sects or tribes of users who rally around common interests, heritage or affinity. Even in a seemingly homogenous world, personalization and heterogeneity thrive. Most services, from search to to newsfeeds, seem to be personalized to suit the individual user's need. Almost all categories of online usage seem to be moving towards hyper-personalization, all based on the individual's social trending, search, and unique, personal, browsing data.

What keeps Internet service providers from being responsible for, and perhaps prosecuted for, the content trafficked over their networks is a provision of a law that Web advocates ironically opposed while it was being argued in 1998: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As long as ISPs do not take interest in the nature or technical breakdown of that content, then its creators and publishers can't hold them liable for intellectual property theft - this is the "safe harbor" provision.

That law isn't going away any time soon. Meanwhile, the recording and publishing industries - stymied by the ineffectiveness of prosecuting individual IP violators - know that the ISP is the one remaining place where they can attack the problem of IP theft. (Certainly they can't prosecute themselves and their own partners for ineffective security.)

Okay, you know that the cloud and better mobility management are going to be two of the top tech trends in just about anyone's survey. And IBM's latest report verifies this. But what you probably didn't know is how important analytics will play. IBM interviewed more than 4,000 IT pros from around the world and consolidated its results here.

There's an interesting discussion brewing in the wake of some of the comparison articles recently published about the latest Android tablet devices, including Amazon's Kindle Fire. I'm on record here as liking what I saw from the initial publication of Joshua Topolsky's "revenge" upon Engadget, The Verge, and I'd be blind if I didn't point out that competitor publications may feel they have something to gain by casting The Verge in a negative light. That's by way of disclaimer.

That said, I think the discussion about what's important in a product review is an important one to have, and we need to have it periodically. The current debate stems from whether device specifications - particularly with respect to this positive recommendation of the iPhone 4S by Consumer Reports and this comparison of Kindle, Nook, and iPad tablets by The Verge - truly matter nowadays with respect to buyers' decisions.