Have you ever wondered

how big the internet is? I have. This morning I came upon an answer of sorts (there may be plenty more). This is how it happened. I was lurking around the blog of Javier Marias, whom I may have mentioned before (I am a Marias fan). There I came upon an article written by one Owen Roberts, whom I have never met. Here is the link:

http://www.klsyfrd.com/ndpublishing/?tag=bad-nature

Owen Roberts, while doing some footwork for a new edition of an old work by Marias, Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico, had this to say about the size of the internet:

... you would never really think about how many Elvis sites there are. According to Quantcast.com rankings, there are more than fifty websites in the top million websites on the Internet. This doesn’t sound like many, but the top million sites get a lot of traffic compared to most sites out there. According to some report written in February of 2008, there were approximately 156 million websites, of which 62 million were active. Considering that the total number of websites on the Internet has grown exponentially since 1995, this number could be way way more...

This was only an aside as he was in fact wondering about how many Elvis sites there are, how active they are, and what all this actually means. His conclusion? Marias is not the only Elvis fan out there (I agree). And the internet is larger than one thinks, whatever one thinks.

Selfportrait

Here I am, searching. That was when Stretch was still around.