If you’ve spent any amount time watching your Facebook or Twitter feed stream by, it should be obvious that the world is creating a lot of data. But because all that data is really just a collection of ones and zeros it can be hard to actually visualize how much is really there. Sure, we can put a number on it, like 1.8 zettabytes being created and replicated (as in copied to DVDs and shared in the cloud) this year alone — a number that doubles every two years, according to a recent study by IDC and EMC. But how much is that, really? Not only is data itself ethereal and hard to visualize, but the numbers are so gargantuan that they quickly become too abstract to grasp. --Josh Catone