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I think I sent my first email back in 1993. That period is all a bit hazy. I think I was doing it for a friend. But that could just be post-hoc self-justification.

About 35 trillion emails will be sent this year. That is approximately 17 emails a day for every person on this planet. Somewhat depressingly about 40% of these (7 per person) are spam.

This compares with 620 billion SMS texts in the first quarter of 2007 (which will mean 3 trillion for the year presumably). Or the 167 billion minutes of international telephone calls made in 2005.

That's a whole lot of talking going on. (N.B. I'd love to know the total number of phone calls made worldwide 2007 - anyone got that data?)

Which makes the number of blogs, wikis, etc out there look pretty puny.