ReadWriteWeb

Are you ready for IPv6? Did you know you'd better soon be ready? Is your ISP, or even country ready, and do they know why?

If you don't even know what IPv6 is, you are not alone. There are billions of people who don't know, and they shouldn't, since this fundamental protocol - IPv6 being the latest version of IP, invented in the 1970s by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn - is so deeply buried in the Internet services we use every day that when you are forced to see it, you know something is very, very wrong.

A study from wireless billing vendor Validas has revealed that Verizon Wireless smartphone owners are now exceeding the data usage of iPhone owners, who are currently restricted to AT&T. According to the study, average data consumption on Verizon smartphones is 421 MB as opposed to 338 MB on the iPhone. Out of all the vendors, Verizon Wireless has seen the largest data usage increase over the past year, jumping from 33.4% to 42.9%.

The Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year's time, we were told today by John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). The same thing was also stated recently by Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist.

The main reason for the concern? There's an explosion of data about to happen to the Web - thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data. Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.

What parts of a city do locals know are interesting, but are off the beaten path of typical tourists? Now that a growing amount of photography has been enriched with public data, questions like that are something we can tackle in new and interesting ways.

Photographer Eric Fischer has created a number of interesting data visualizations using geotagged location data on photo sharing service Flickr. His latest project compares the locations of photos that were taken in major cities by people who have posted there for a short time (tourists) vs. those who post there for a long period of time (locals). The results are striking and fun.

In my previous few articles, I've explored the potential impact of sensors on the Internet. Soon there will be a trillion sensors connected to the Web, which will result in an explosion of online data. How will this mass of new and mostly real-time data be processed and analyzed? Will current data analytics software be able to cope? The short answer is, no it won't. New types of analytics software will be required, together with much more powerful computers.

During my visit to HP Labs last month, I sat down with Meichun Hsu - director of the Intelligent Information Management Lab at Hewlett Packard - to discuss this issue. Hsu has been researching new real-time, sensor analytics solutions for the coming Internet of Things era.

One of the key aspects of the emerging Internet of Things - where real-world objects are connected to the Internet - is the massive amount of new data on the Web that will result. As more and more "things" in the world are connected to the Internet, it follows that more data will be uploaded to and downloaded from the cloud. And this is in addition to the burgeoning amount of user-generated content - which has increased 15-fold over the past few years, according to a presentation that Google VP Marissa Mayer made last August at Xerox PARC. Mayer said during her presentation that this "data explosion is bigger than Moore's law."

During my visit to Hewlett Packard Labs earlier this month, I spoke to Parthasarathy Ranganathan - a Distinguished Technologist at HP Labs - about this large influx of data onto the Web.

The U.S. Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. In addition to a massive printed collection, the Library already has an extensive collection of other digital assets. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world.

The Library does extensive work with data format standards, the semantic Web and other platforms for outside analysis. The addition of Twitter into the organization's offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research. From a new kind of historical record to an unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction, this is big.