I've been reflecting a bit about the CNET News report that highlights the spectacular online interest in NASA's latest Mars mission. According to the report, NASA claims that its home page alone received some 6.5 billion "hits" in the past six weeks - more than one hit for every person on the planet (current population: 6,350,181,520 and counting). CNET notes that raw "hits" are not a very accurate estimate of true Web traffic - unique visits, a more accurate estimate of true human traffic, generally are a very small fraction of the hit rate - so NASA's enthusiasm may be a bit overblown. But still, here is probably the number one Web phenomenon at the moment that has grown almost exclusively from direct lookups and Web search engine referrals, not from the efforts of any publisher or ad machine - powerful mindshare collateral to leverage at the cost of a few Web servers. Probably of more interest to contemplate is the latest estimate on total Web pages that surfaced in a New York Times article on Web search engines - 10 billion pages, if we are to believe the NYT. Looking at the same baseline, that's more than 1.5 web pages in existence for every person on the planet. That brings a whole new dimension to the concept of global content markets, does it not?