A great article filled with real world examples. http://www.insidecrm.com/features/narc-out-seo-fraud-070108/

Cisco this week released its Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast and Methodology, 2007-2012 [PDF] and companion piece Approaching the Zettabyte Era [PDF], well-considered projections of where we're headed given the impact on the internet of visual networking applications.  They're well worth the read.

In an act of confident prognostication, they estimate that the annual run rate of IP traffic in 2012 will be 522 exabytes, more than half a zettabyte. This will no doubt be an interesting over-under bet at your favorite sports bar.  In this case, I'll bet on the over.

Why?  I'm listening to "Stumbling on Happiness", which describes how predictions of the future so often underestimate the mark by extrapolating from the present based on what we know, without much of a factor for the emergence of the "Black Swan", or the things that we can't possible imagine happening in the next few years. We don't know what they'll be, but we should at least assume that something unanticipated will come along.

If I had to pick one of the internals from Cisco's prediction to support my bet on the over, it would be their category of "Internet Gaming", where they lump in “multiplayer virtual world gaming”. There is discussion about underlying factors and assumptions in gaming's use of bandwidth bandwidth, but I think the focus on “gaming” as the primary purpose of virtual environments underestimates the role of this kind of interface in future applications in many areas: business and commerce, education, government, entertainment. And while current bandwidth usage is moderated by how much of the virtual environment is actually created at the user’s computer, using lightweight communications with the virtual world servers, this will change. More integration with real-world data in the simulated world will demand higher real-time bandwidth consumption.

And for those of you wanting to know about exabytes and zettabytes, here’s a quick lesson from Cisco (and we haven’t even started talking about yottabytes yet!)

(Thanks to Christine Kerner for the link to the report, via Facebook)

I found a file of search results I had compiled a long time ago as I was writing scripts to automatically scrape sites based on patterns. This experiment had to do with the Butterfly Effect, testing some regular expressions around "a butterfly flaps its wings in..." The Butterfly Effect meme itself is invariant, but the variation in locations and effects is entertaining. My file of results notes that I did these searches using AltaVista - so that dates it a bit! Here are a few of the results:

A butterfly flaps its wings in:	Causing:	At this location:
a certain part of the world	a storm	the other side of the world
Africa	tsunami	Japan
Amazonian rainforest	earthquake	the other side of the world
Asian rain forest	hurricane	Gulf of Mexico
Australia	the weather	Alaska
Beijing	stock market flounders	Wall Street
Beijing	the weather	New York City, but more likely, Queens
Beijing	win $400,000	Montreal Casino
Beijing	the weather	Latin America
Beijing	the weather	New York City
Brazil	thunderstorms	New York
Brazil	devastating storms and floods	England
Brazil	hurricane	North America
Brazil	storm	Norway
Brazil	man falls off a skyscraper	New York
Brazil	thunderstorms	New York
California	rain	New York City
Canada	some impact on the weather	south of the border
Canada	hurricane	south Atlantic
Central American rain forest	the amount of rainfall	Chicago
Central Park	typhoon	Pacific Ocean
Central Park	rain	China
Central Park	rain	Peking
Central Park	rain	China
China	hurricane	Florida
China	Startup error goes away	Descent 3
China	the weather	New York
China	hurricane	the Atlantic
China	enough boomers move their funds to the bond market to cause the third derivative of some program's equation for the market to move from positive to negative	?
China	rain	New York
England	typhoon	China
far-away continent	a development of a major unstable weather pattern	half way around the world
Hong Kong	hurricane	London
Hong Kong	snow	Miami
Hong Kong	Internet stocks go back up	?
Hong Kong	effects	Chicago
Hong Kong	hurricane	Gulf of Mexico
Japan	the weather	Philadelphia
Madagascar	the weather	Cape Town
Malaysia	hurricane	Trinidad
Mexico	hurricane	Florida
New Mexico	rain storm	the Amazon
New York	hurricane	Japan
one side of the world	hurricane	the other
one side of the world	earthquake	the other hemisphere
the forest	typhoon	Indonesia
this side of the world	hurricane	the other side of the world
?	trembles	universe
?	moves	the planet
?	weather	China
?	rain	somewhere
?	the weather	hundreds of miles away
?	an ill wind blows you a $100 bill	?
?	something else	the other side of the world
?	stampede of Zebras	?
?	hurricane	the other side of the earth
?	the climate changes	the other side of the world

By the way, I never concocted the ultimate regular expression for this, so if you have any good ones, feel free to comment them!