Looking back - BBC Article

I just came across this BBC article from 1999 on mapping the internet. Internet cartography has certainly become more sophisticated since this was written, but it's interesting to look back and see that the big questions remain the same: how do you produce a map of something for which distance is irrelevant? what are the units of measurement - servers, people, IP addresses?

10 Years of Internet Images

Today Information Week published a Gallery entitled "10 Years of Internet Images." Some of these I've posted on before, but there were some great examples I hadn't seen that map the idiosyncracies of some of the world's more isolated/disrupted networks such as Iran and Cuba. The map shown above is of the Yugoslavian network during the Balkan Wars circa 1999.

"These two images come from Yugoslavia between March and July 1999, during the NATO bombing of the country. The dips in the lower image represent infrastructure going offline and traffic re-routing to adjust itself. Markulec says this information can be valuable for war fighters because it shows the impact on a communications infrastructure, where and how communications are being restored, and where the greatest points of weakness exist."