Data is the new measure of wealth

We are awash in massive amounts of data.  Emails, IM chats, Videos, Digital videos and photos, twitter feeds, ads, mobile conversations, the list goes on and on.  In 2004, world internet traffic reached 1 exabytes,   This is 10^18 bytes of information, or 1 million million Megabytes.   With the growth of very large data-intensive companies like Google, and Facebook (which didn't exist 10 years) we are seeing the increasing importance large amounts data will bring to the economy.    Facebook will (probably) get an initial valuation of 100 Billion dollars once it goes public based purely on the notion of collecting and linking large amounts user-generated content.  Data is becoming a new form of wealth.