Now a new analysis from the same group suggests that investment in clean energy has already topped investments in coal, natural gas and other fossil fuel infrastructure

Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.

All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.

But they are also creating a host of new problems.

Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world. To offer a nonalphabetical option for navigating the entries, this year we have attached tags to each item indicating subject matter. We hope you enjoy.

Track how millions of fans interact with online music everyday.

The Web Trend Map community curates meaningful link trends by choosing sources they trust.

This great data visualisation from the NY Times comes to us via a really fascinating website called Information is Beautiful. It represents the sales in billions of today’s dollars of the various music formats over time.

A new sequencing service aims to take whole-genome sequencing mainstream.

The reason I am obsessed with self-tracking is because I think there is a way to track yourself in such a way that it leads to epiphanies about yourself, about the cause and effect of things, in such a way that these numbers would eventually be able to tell you things about yourself that you didn’t already know. This is the only reason to self-track, in my opinion.

"People worry about Google making us dumber, or at the very least changing the way in which we think. But it strikes me that the smartphone, with its constant ability to immerse us in the flow of the Metaverse (albeit in a limited way, today) is likely to play a much bigger role in how our neocortex changes the way in which we think, from the basic "processing" we do about the mundane details of our day to the very way in which insight happens."

On the role of Android beyond mobile phones, and the way print should take advantages of e-readers, iphones, etc with so called 'appgazines'.

The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy.

A friend commented recently that she doesn't understand why people put up with such poor sound quality for phone calls on cell phones, and particularly iPhones. "I can hardly hear the person talking to me," she said. "I don't think smart phones are making any improvement to the quality of the phone call," she added. "Is it not important anymore?" She wondered why people accepted such poor quality, and so did Jonathan Berger, but a lot of people just don't hear it the same way.

Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money.

Gen Y is taking over. The generation of young adults that's composed of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and even some Gen X'ers, is the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Gen X. As the Boomers fade into retire

Who sent you the most email messages last year? What hour of the day do you receive the most new messages? Which of all the mailing lists you're on are the most active? A new command line tool called Mail Trends works with Gmail over IMAP and can give you

Contagious is a quarterly intelligence briefing in magazine, DVD and online format. It identifies the ideas, trends and innovations behind the world’s most revolutionary marketing strategies.

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it.

Latest news about new sustainable or eco-ideas

Until the development of water and wind power, humanity burned carbon-based fuels like wood and coal to power our civilization. These very same fuels are now polluting the air and water with heavy metals, ozone pollution, and acid rain.

Nrc Next had gisteren een interessant artikel over de muziekindustrie en een actie van popmuzikant Prince, die zijn laatste cd gratis weggeeft aan de bezoekers van zijn 21 concerten in Londen.

Robert Scoble en Shel Israel, auteurs van Naked Conversations, vragen zich af of bloggen passé is.

Open source accounts for between 25 and 70 percent of all software in Australian, Chinese, Indian and Korean companies, according to a recent IDC survey.

BlogPulse Trend Search allows you to create graphs that visually track "buzz" over time for certain key words, phrases or links. Compare search terms/links in isolation, or use all three fields to compare search terms/links against others.

"Ik voel me connector tussen de bovenstroom en de onderstroom, waarbij ik probeer de bovenstroom (daar verkeren de meeste van ons de meeste tijd en daar vind je de vanzelfsprekendheid, het alledaagse, de systemen, de verkokering, de verzuiling, de verbrok

Gapminder turns boring statistics into something new and interesting, using visualizations and animateions. The Gapminder Goal: enable you to make sense of the world by having fun with statistics.

"I'm now completely obsessed with a brand new class of personal lifestyle gizmos - a class that is very much in sync with the emergent energy puritanism that I find myself unexpectedly interested in after An Inconvenient Truth. The class of objects is 'th