Today the Web is bursting with social media content and a burgeoning supply of (and demand for) "real-time" information. This information is created as people open new Facebook and other social media accounts, churn out Tweets and other microblogs, post photos and videos, and tirelessly text one another. But getting a grip on exactly how much is happening--and what the primary sources are--is a slippery task, especially since web companies often jealously guard their metrics.

The new social media counter. Credit: Gary Hayes.

Now there's a social-media "clock" of sorts, which you can check out here. It charts the second-by-second accumulation of social-media accounts, blogs, Tweets, photo uploadings, status updates, and the like. Consider it the social-media equivalent of that national-deficit "clock" in Times Square.

The effort does require a reality check. It's not actually an accurate rendering of the real-time Web. Rather, it's a counter, created by an Australia-based virtual-world entepreneur named Gary Hayes. Hayes set the various rates of increase according to various estimates culled from disparate sources such as analysts, company blogs, and news media accounts. Some of the estimates are several months old and may not actually be accurate or complete.

But, while it may not provide any new primary information, or be accurate in all categories, Hayes' social-media clock is nevertheless an excellent visualization of where much of the Web's growth is coming from these days.

The summer months saw a sharp drop in user interest in Wolfram Alpha, the online "computational knowledge engine" that calculates everything from planetary distances to cholesterol levels and generates (from the topics it knows) customized charts and graphics not available from general search engines. In the peak days after the May 15 launch, traffic soared to around 2.8 million daily visitors--but then hit a trough of 200,000 in July, according to the company. But now, with traffic now drifting back toward the 300,000 mark, the site is pinning its hopes partly on a new application programming interface (API) to leverage the online tool in websites, online publishing, desktop applications and mobile devices. An iPhone app will be one of the early examples.

It will be interesting to see how third-parties leverage the depth of Wolfram Alpha's knowledge in math, science, geography, and engineering beyond the simple search-engine-like interface that now confronts users. Right now, the engine has a ways to go to meet the goal of its brainchild, the physicist Stephen Wolfram, to "make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone."

The rebound toward 300,000 visitors may reflect a back-to-school bump, with students seeing the engine as a great tool for doing their math and science homework, according to Schoeller Porter, who heads up Wolfram's API program. (Indeed, the engine is throwing a homework day event next week to promote further such use.) "We had an enormous launch with a huge amount of interest and a lot of traffic. The traffic fell off, and we fully expected that; it was a nice relaxation for us, and it let us fix code and put in new features," he told me this morning. "It followed a kind of---I won't say overhyped--but a well-hyped launch." Wolfram Alpha is built on Mathematica--Stephen Wolfram's comprehensive repository of mathematical and scientific formulae--and fed by datasets curated by Wolfram Research.

President Obama is still looking for a national chief technology officer to help forge U.S. technology policy, but today he did something that could have even more impact, at least in the short run. He announced the appointment of a chief information officer to help drag the federal government's vast and ossified computer infrastructure into the Facebook age.

Obama's pick is Vivek Kundra, 34, who is currently chief technology officer for the District of Columbia. He will be expected to expand uses of cutting-edge technology, but also to make sane investments. Judging by his track record, citizens might soon see some concrete changes: new ways to access public information, new online tools for communicating with federal agencies, and access to new databases. One way to reform federal IT would be more effective information sharing between agencies (did anyone say CIA and FBI?). The federal government certainly has a sorry history of white-elephant IT upgrades, including a bungled FBI computer overhaul well described in this Washington Post story of a couple of years ago.

Kundra's plans already include a data.gov website to provide the public with vast amounts of searchable government information. All this will be a vast leap in scale from the current offerings of his DC website, which has been an interesting test bed for making local government more responsive and transparent. There, you can do things like download maps of Wi-Fi access spots and view city contracts. He also launched an apps for democracy contest that resulted in residents suggesting Web and phone applications that would do things like provide better access to crime reports. He's even been pushing to allow people to pay their parking tickets via Facebook. In a statement, Obama said, "I have directed him to work to ensure that we are using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations."