What's the best way to measure the scale of the internet?

Youtube, one of the most popular sites on the web, has announced that it now sees one hour of video uploaded to its servers every second. Every day, these videos receive five billion views.

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I recently came across a feature in Youtube that's not quite hidden but not very well advertised either.

It's on every video: look at the grey bar that allows you to choose the resolution and switch to full-screen mode. To the left of those buttons is a smaller one marked CC, which stands for 'closed-captioning', or subtitles as they're known in the UK.

It's been around for a year or so, but unfortunately it wasn't enormously impressive and hasn't improved a huge amount since then. It uses speech recognition to automatically detect what's being said - in theory.

Speech recognition can work quite well - recent products from market-leader Nuance, for instance, have been very impressive. Generally, though, the program needs to be trained for a specific voice before it works properly.

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