Did the Egyptians in Alexandria ever sleep?

It’s really a difficult choice with so many interesting stuff around and being added daily. Shall I write today or shall I read some more instead. This week my choice was reading, to be honest, I didn’t have that much to add either. And I don’t just want to contribute interesting links to other blogs that found interesting blogs 😉 What’s the real sense of this entire information overload, where does this thirst of pro-active information gathering/reading/writing comes from? Why was no one reading the old 27 pieces encyclopedia just for fun, but now they all have the urge to read those 100’s of interesting blogs?
It might have started some 2300 years ago with the Egyptian library of Alexandria. All ships passing through the port of Alexandria were required to allow copies to be made of any scrolls they had on board, if they were of interest to the Library. After 200 years they had 500k documents in house, and even better they had a catalog of all existing works and a summary, so someone must have been doing a lot of reading 😉 When the library burned down all was lost. Ans some 20 years ago the gigantic work was restarted and again each publisher in the world is asked to send 2 copies of each book they print. But is internet going to be their new inferno? We’ll know in 20 years from now.
So no coincidence Alexa is called after the old Egyptian library. Since 1996 Alexa crawls internet and makes a snapshot (which takes 2 months nowadays), currently gathering approximately 1.6 Tera per day which they "dump" in the WayBackMachine. The online library is accessible through the internet archive and allows you to look at pages from the past, e.g. Microsoft Belux in 2001 or the very first page of the VRT in 1998.
I think it’s all just addiction, like the need for speed, the need for information, even when it doesn’t make sense or doesn’t add any value to have it. But fun is also a lot of added value. And that’s how I found this page on the right with the Microsoft BeNeLux management anno 1998 back. FYI, 7 out of the nine people on the picture are still with the company. What about that as proof of stability 🙂