Informational distance between cities

This is a visualization of the "informational distance between cities" as measured by the "google proximity" and geographic distance...all explained on this very simple and beautiful site.

via infosthetics.com

2008 Webware 100

The winners for 2008's Webware 100 are just out and the winner's list is a nicely categorized directory of what's great on the web right now.

Web 2.0, 3.0, 4.0....

This may have been out there for a while, but I just came across this basic visual representation of the evolution of the web over time.
Via webware.com

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20080418/webtimeline.jpg

Geographic coverage of media sources

An article in L'observatoire des Medias shows a project to capture the geographic coverage of major media outlets. Interesting to compare traditional media to online-only to "the blogosphere" (which is shown above).
From the article:
The cartograms below show the world through the eyes of editors-in-chief, in 2007.
Countries swell as they receive more media attention; others shrink as we forget them

Heat-mapping internet search terms by country

Lifehacker and Google Blogoscoped posted how-tos on using Google Spreadsheets to create a world map illustrating how much a given search term relates to different countries. The example in their post shows concentrations in Brazil and Russia for the keyword "samba"

Visual Search Engines

Infosthetics.com has a good summary of emerging visual search engines posted today. SearchMe's tag line is "you'll know it when you see it" which really gets to the key challenge of navigating a text-based internet for visual people.

Internet Reachability

The University of Washington's Hubble system tracks unreachable areas of the internet in real time.

From their website:
Having trouble accessing a favorite Web site? Perhaps the site was taken offline, or the computer hosting it is down for maintenance. However, the cause could be something more mysterious. At any given moment, a portion of Internet traffic ends up being routed into information "black holes." These are situations where advertised paths exist to the destination, but messages - a request to visit a Web site, an outgoing e-mail - get lost along the way. Hubble is a system that operates continuously to find persistent Internet black holes as they occur.

MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind

There is an incredible exhibit on right now at MoMA that is right up this blog's alley.

See also a nice summary from Creative Review.