Wikipedia defines the internet (in layman’s terms) as “a network of networks” that “carries a vast array of information.” While we all know it’s much more complicated than this, few of us spend much time thinking about this “network of networks.”  The internet is notoriously an intangible, abstract item that the average email/internet user dedicates little mindshare to.

Luckily for us, Pingdom, a company that offers uptime monitoring services, has done their share and more, scouring the internet for, well… data on the internet.  You can find the full report in this blog post from last week, Internet 2009 in Numbers.

While some of the figures weren’t a big surprise (81% of email was spam per their data), some were quite interesting:

-       2009 saw a 24% increase in spam over the year prior

-       148,000 new zombie computers were created each day

-       100 million new email users joined the world of email

-       And collectively we sent 90 trillion emails during the year (although spammers can take credit for the vast majority of these)

Even more stats can be found in the full post.