The Swedish monitoring service Pingdom has published a couple of graphs of the Web’s growth from zero websites to 162 million. I’ve added my own commentary to the one below. This post is brilliantly, economically, unemotionally, frankly Swedish.

According to the latest numbers, there are more than 162 million websites on the internet today. We have come a long way since the first baby steps of the World Wide Web. Back in January of 1996 we had 100,000 websites, and if we go back to mid-1993 there were only a total of 130 websites. Not much need for Google in those days…

Image courtesy of nswlearnscope

Over the holiday I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s new book ‘Meatball Sundae’, in which he argues that we stand on the brink of a fourth industrial revolution. His chronology goes something like this (I added the clock stuff):

• Industrial Revolution 1.0 - 1760-1840: The big one. Where steam, water-power and pocket-watches begat production and employees.
• Industrial Revolution 2.0 - 1840-1950: Production on a massive scale in more efficient factories. Think Henry Ford, the wristwatch and *much* bigger clocks.
• Industrial Revolution 3.0 - 1950s-present: Time-punch machines. The moment the Service Sector took over. Mass-marketing created demand and communication technologies connected people and ideas with stuff being made. The age of what Seth might call ‘the TV-industrial complex‘.
• Industrial Revolution 4.0 - Now: Welcome to the ‘Web-industrial complex‘. Ten years in, there’s a clock in your face pretty much all of the time. Look at your screen right now. Nevertheless, the technology finally starts working properly and becomes ‘enjoyable’ and cheap enough for everyone to join in. Seth describes 14 trends that result from this, including: infinite on-demand access to just about everything, infinite channels of communication, the atomisation of information (as it can be represented, sliced, diced and piped the way you want it). Most exciting are the effects of power shifting from top-down to bottom-up and consumers getting direct access to producers and each other. Welcome to The New Marketing.

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