It’s as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.

Here’s some statistics from Neilson:

• 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide (September 2009)
• 90 trillion emails sent on the Internet in 2009 (100 million new email users since 2008)
• 234 million websites as of December 2009 (47 million more than in 2008)
• 4 billion photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009)
• 30 billion (at the current rate) photos uploaded to Facebook per year.
• 1 billion videos YouTube serves in one day
• 1,693,000 terabytes of information is created and stored every year
• Internet traffic will grow to 44 exabytes per month by 2012, more than double what it is today.
  
• The exaflood refers to the rapidly increasing amount of data that is being transferred over the Internet.

And a video that makes the point graphically: