Internet Geography

Social Media Prism

2010-06-10T22:33:00.003+02:00

From ethority, a German social media consultancy, comes this prism breaking out the social media world into sub-categories.

Time lapse internet growth

2010-02-15T23:18:00.002+01:00

"This is a movie made by the Internet Mapping Project at Bell Labs/Lumeta Corporation. The visualization represents data captured by sending billions of traceroute-type packets."

Pearltrees

2010-01-07T21:42:00.003+01:00

Pearltrees is a social bookmarking tool that allows people to organize links and information visually into a web of interconnected nodes.

Here's how their site describes it:
Pearltrees is a collaborative network that let users create, enrich and share the world of their interests. We call it a human-powered interest network because its content is made and organized by its community. In Pearltrees, everyone creates its world and uses parts of others' worlds to extend it. By doing so, everyone contributes to the overall project: building the first human organization of the Web.

Social Web Involvement Visualization

2009-12-30T05:32:00.002+01:00

Global Map of Social Media - December 2009 -
This graphic shows the geographic breakdown of different social web technologies (photo, video, social network, blog, microblog) and the extent to which they are used among those with internet access. The research from TrendStream is based on interviews with 32,000 Internet users in 16 countries.

via mashable.com

Periodic Table of World Internet Facts

2009-12-15T19:11:00.003+01:00

Here's a different approach to depicting the internet as a periodic table from appfrica.net [see another version here]. This article explains how to read the table -- essentially each country is listed with the following information:

"Each block contains up to eight pieces of information. The rank (and sequential order of the chart), place among the top ten fastest growing internet populations, the country code (also the countries ccTLD), rank among the countries with the fastest bandwidth speeds, percentage of population using the internet, the country name, and in some cases whether or not the block represents a country or territory."

Languages on the Internet

2009-12-10T04:32:00.000+01:00

This is from a really thoughtful post on 'China and the World Map of the Internet', which includes several iterations of visual representations of how China relates to the world. The version above is the cloud map view of the relative proportion of languages used on the internet.

Visualization of the Journey of a Tweet

2009-12-01T19:39:00.001+01:00

Here's a visualization of how a tweet find its way around the internet and into our networked lives. See the write-up on Next Generation Online about how this project came to be.

Interview with Frank Jacobs on the power of maps

2009-11-19T04:13:00.000+01:00

Map lovers out there will enjoy this interview with Frank Jacobs (of Strange Maps).

The Boom of Social Sites

2009-11-17T19:45:00.005+01:00

This infographic shows the relative size of social networking sites chronologically distributed by the year they were launched.

via Stefan Waldeck on posterous

Good Morning Twitter

2009-11-05T19:53:00.001+01:00

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GoodMorning! Full Render #2 from blprnt on Vimeo.

From Fast Company:
"Twitter is a coming goldmine for data visualization, given all the data it provides. The projects we've seen are still early stage, but Jer Thorp's been one of the best early experimenters. His new project, "Good Morning!" is a visualization of 24 hours of Tweets saying, of course, "Good Morning," from all across the world. Each of the tweets has been color-coded by time--green tweets are early morning, local time; orange occurs somewhere around 9am; red tweets are late morning; and black represents Tweets that are "out of time," meaning that they don't correspond with actual morning hours."

Apple HQ App Store Visualization

2009-10-31T05:40:00.003+01:00

I visited Apple headquarters in Cupertino this week and saw this incredible visualization of real-time purchases from the iTunes App Store. Cameras were prohibited, but I found this video online, which gives a sense of what the display is like.

Internet Mapping as Performance Art

2009-10-03T19:29:00.002+02:00

See Sara Schnadt's online portfolio for more information about a series of performance art exhibitions she undertook on the topic of connectivity. This image is from a performance piece she did in 2007, described on her site as:

"Two days a week throughout the month of December at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Sara Schnadt constructed a network of string, thread, twine and wire between two maps across the gallery. By connecting these maps - one, a text-array map presenting large quantities of popular internet search terms, and the other, a geographical map plotting internet access around the globe - Schnadt created a low-tech visualization of the world wide web. Using a wide range of found and donated fiber she metaphorically celebrated the many types and sources of content on the web and its publicly accessible, free exchange of knowledge."

via feastoffun.com

Submarine Cable System Infographic

2009-10-01T05:07:00.000+02:00

Here's an updated look from TeleGeography at the world's submarine cable system, upon which our internet connectivity relies.

"This map shows 93 of the world's major submarine cable systems, as well as 28 planned systems that are due to enter service by 2011."

MIT's Personas Project

2009-09-06T20:02:00.000+02:00

Here's a fascinating new project from MIT:

What is Personas
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, recently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

How Does it Work?
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Venn Diagram in Search of Accurate Information on the Internet

2009-08-22T04:58:00.000+02:00

A little humor from Bunny Comics.

Internet Visualization from AT&T Labs

2009-07-19T05:28:00.000+02:00

AT&T Labs is doing some very interesting things with network visualization. I came across this graphic on Flickr, but can't find the original version on AT&T Labs' site, but I certainly wish I could find out more information about it.

The Internet in 1901

2009-04-15T04:41:00.000+02:00

Here's a map of the earliest form of the internet, sourced from Tom Standage's blog post. It maps telegraph lines in 1901.

iA Webtrend Map 2009

2009-04-10T03:49:00.001+02:00

iA's fourth version of their web trend map is here! I've posted on previous versions in the past: V3, V2

Keyword Mapping

2009-03-19T12:48:00.003+01:00

KWMap is an interesting site that applies visualization to help us identify better keywords for web searches. Basically, you enter a keyword to start, which appears at the intersection of two strands of related keywords. From there you can select any of the related keywords to "recenter" a new list of keywords. The visualization itself is not dynamic (i.e. it always shows your keyword on the continuum of the same two strands), but is somehow much more appealing than other keyword generation sites.

Akamai Visualizations

2009-01-07T23:25:00.005+01:00

Akamai, a company providing platforms for global internet content, has some interesting visualizations of dimensions of the internet including traffic, latency, performance and attacks. The map above shows traffic using a real-time heat-map style display.

From their site:
Akamai handles 20% of the world's total Web traffic, providing a unique view into what's happening on the Web - what events are generating traffic, how much, from where, and why....get a feel for the world's online behavior at any given moment - how much rich media is on the move, the sheer volume of data in play, the number and concentration of worldwide visitors, and average connection speeds worldwide.

Fantastic New TeleGeography Map

2008-12-08T13:51:00.006+01:00

The folks at TeleGeography have just posted a new map entitled "The Global Internet Map". According to their press release this new map:
...illustrates the the key Internet connections that link the countries and the five major regions of the world. Regional close-up maps detail the primary intra-regional Internet routes in Europe, Asia, North and Latin America, and Africa. Nine accompanying figures and tables present valuable data about Internet bandwidth by country, regional and global Internet capacity growth, service providers, traffic by application, wholesale IP transit pricing, and broadband user growth.

This is certainly the most comprehensive, well designed, current map out there of the physical infrastructure of the internet that I have seen. I've posted on previous maps of theirs before.

Mapping Internet Traffic

2008-12-03T20:16:00.007+01:00

There are a few sites out there that visualize internet "traffic" in real time.

Internet Traffic Report shows a very basic stop-light style map using volume, response time and packet loss as indicators.

Internet Health Report shows packet loss rates by internet service provider on a heatmap-style color scale, with data refreshed every 15 minutes.

Internet Weather Report used to be hosted at www.mids.org, however as far as I can tell that site is no longer functioning. It's a shame, though, because this site provided doppler-radar style MPEG movies of conditions on the internet. The image above is a still from the Boston area.
About the project:
These maps show round trip times from our offices to approximately 4,500 domains worldwide, currently every four hours, six times a day, seven days a week, using ICMP ECHO (ping).

UPDATE: Caida, which I've blogged about before, also has a number of visualization tools here

ShowWorld - animated maps

2008-11-17T23:47:00.003+01:00

ShowWorld is building on the equal area cartograms I just posted on from WorldMapper but animating them the way we've seen Hans Rosling demonstrate at TED and through the Gapminder site. Right now the data isn't deep enough to see timelapse on the categories of 'internet users' or 'broadband', but the interface is slick and looks promising for the future.

Worldmapper - Distribution of Internet Users

2008-11-17T14:34:00.004+01:00

A collaboration between University of Sheffield and University of Michigan professors, Worldmapper creates a wide range of "equal area cartograms." These are maps that resize the territory of each country according to a variable. In honor of Geography Awareness Week, check out their innovative approach to visual cartography. Worldmapper website.

The map pictured is the distribution of the 631 million internet users worldwide in 2002. It's interesting to compare this with the same data from 1990. According to Worldmapper, the number of people using the internet increased by 224 times during this period.

"The distribution of Internet users worldwide has changed remarkably over just a dozen years. In 1990 Internet users were mainly found in the United States, Western Europe, Australia, Japan and Taiwan. By 2002 people living in Asia Pacific, Southern Asia, South America, China and Eastern Europe were notable Internet users. A not insignificant number of Internet users are also shown to be in Northern Africa, Southeastern Africa and the Middle East."

DeviantArt Map

2008-10-12T23:26:00.000+02:00

Artist 'darkdoomer' on DeviantArt posted this graphical representation of the internet. A self-titled 'work in progress' this map echoes (and in some cases directly borrows from) other conceptual maps I've blogged on such as XKCD and its Polish cousin. darkdoomer's version steals a few pieces directly from XKCD, including 'Sea of Memes', updates the content a bit and includes more detail, but like XKCD still doesn't use the relative area or shape of the 'landforms' to communicate much of a view on the internet's underlying form.

Looking back - BBC Article

2008-09-30T13:18:00.000+02:00

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

2008-09-10T13:44:00.004+02:00

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."

Dashpoet

2008-08-26T19:16:00.003+02:00

This colorful, happy design from dashpoet.com is a "map" of links to children's websites. Link

Dashpoet.com features a number of "original internet maps" all using bright colors and simple design. Maps include news, travel, shopping, football, museums, music and more.

Mapping the Digital Divide in Africa

2008-08-25T23:52:00.004+02:00

In 2005 Acacia published an atlas full of fantastic maps on this topic. Acacia is an information and communication technology initative in sub-Saharan Africa. The map shown here is a measure of the ICT Opportunity Index, which combines "ITU's Digital Access Index and Orbicom's Monitoring the Digital Divide/Infostate conceptual framework and model."
Page 16 also has a great map on the affordability of the internet in Africa.

I'd love to see this updated - it's the most comprehensive mapping of internet and telephony infrastructure and access that I've seen.

TouchGraph

2008-08-07T17:47:00.002+02:00

TouchGraph is a free Java application focused on visualization of web-based information and designed to help people explore the connections between related websites.

The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google's database of related sites.

Distribution of NY Times Online news

2008-07-23T17:29:00.000+02:00

Here is another map illustrating the distribution of online news stories over world geography.
This map shows world countries shaded according to the number of search results from the last year at nytimes.com divided by the number of citizens in each country. Link

Ambiguous map from 2007

2008-06-25T23:35:00.000+02:00

This 2007 map by ExploMap shows a distribution of websites over a world map. Their website says it is "based on the websites world classification carried out by Alexa and ComScore. The websites traffic is correlated with the surface of the countries." I wasn't able to tell from their site whether the most "popular" website in each country is listed or if this is relating the relative surface area of countries to the corresponding size/traffic of major websites. (the second seems more plausible given some of the site names...any insight out there on this?) Link to full map

VerveEarth

2008-05-07T15:19:00.003+02:00

VerveEarth plots out blogs by their (self-identified) geographic location (look for Internet Geography in Stamford, CT). Described as "a new way to reach your favorite websites and surf the net," VerveEarth lets you navigate by categories listed across the top and, if you register, you can mark your favorite "destinations." The clean google maps interface brings a nice visual experience to literally travelling the web.

Navigate the Webby Award Winners

2008-05-06T11:34:00.000+02:00

UPDATE: The 2008 Winners have been announced, using the same interactive interface.

7/24/2007 Post:
The Webby Award people have posted an interactive interface to explore all those award-winning 2007 websites.

Informational distance between cities

2008-04-24T23:50:00.004+02:00

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

2008-04-21T21:10:00.003+02:00

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....

2008-04-21T15:28:00.003+02:00

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

2008-04-18T20:30:00.002+02:00

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

2008-04-18T14:35:00.002+02:00

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

2008-04-15T18:51:00.003+02:00

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

2008-04-10T13:13:00.003+02:00

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

2008-04-08T22:33:00.004+02:00

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.

Geographic preferences for social networking platforms

2008-03-26T21:48:00.002+01:00

A breakdown by continent and country of social networking sites' relative dominance. Link. via the publics

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Growth of the Internet

2008-03-18T22:52:00.000+01:00

Interesting representation from Sir Tim Berners-Lee showing the development of the internet/web over time from the early headwaters to the "sea of interoperability."

This one reminded me of the topographical approach xckd took.

via BBC and this blog

iA's Web Trend Map 3

2008-03-10T22:12:00.000+01:00

The latest and greatest from information architects. Link.

Longitudinal View

2008-02-29T21:56:00.000+01:00

A representation of the internet by longitude, from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis.

From CAIDA's site:

This visualization represents a macroscopic snapshot of the Internet for two weeks: August 1st, 2007 through August 15th, 2007. The graph reflects 760,922 IP addresses and 1,400,796 IP links ... We aggregate this view of the network into a topology of Autonomous Systems (ASes), each of which approximately maps to an Internet Service Provider (ISP). We map each IP address to the AS responsible for routing it, i.e., the origin (end-of-path) AS for the best match IP prefix of this address observed in Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing tables. Eighty percent of ASes with known locations are placed in the Americas, Europe/Africa, and Asia/Oceana.

via millsworks

Country domain mapping

2008-02-16T13:52:00.001+01:00

Zooknic.com maps the relative distribution of domains in Google Earth using the concepts of political and technical location.

Undersea Internet

2008-02-13T13:09:00.003+01:00

This map from the Guardian UK shows the undersea cable network supporting much of the world's internet access. (source: braincubes.be)

Internet bandwidth map

2008-01-26T00:18:00.000+01:00

This is old news, but TeleGeography published an updated Global Internet Map in 2006 showing "international internet bandwidth, scaled by capacity—covering backbones operated by more than 300 international Internet carriers as of mid-2005" ... in any case, it's $225 so I probably won't buy it to see the detail, but in the interest of compiling a more comprehensive collection of what is available, I am posting on it. The 2001 version looked good too.

Opte Project

2008-01-05T22:27:00.000+01:00

One of the original widely viewed representations of the internet from the Opte Project (2003 I think). Captures the organic fractal-like development of the web.

Language on the Internet

2007-11-28T11:11:00.000+01:00

This great article/project is home to a number of maps and animations all along the idea of an "internet archipelago." This one in particular looks at the internet through language:

"this mapping is limited to countries are home to a significant population speaking an internet language (a significant population is defined as at least 100,000 first tongue speakers). the political map of the world is rearranged based on internet language populations to create the language archipelago. the united states is placed at the center of the language archipelago for several reasons. it is the only country that has a significant population speaking all ten internet languages. it has the most extensive internet infrastructure. and it was the birthplace of the internet. from there, all the other internet countries are arranged in rays corresponding to the countries’ dominant internet language based on their ascendancy. the national flag at the end of each ray is used as a visual legend to key the ray’s language. this map illustrates the dominant role of the world’s superpowers on in internet and reveal the circumstance of countries at the periphery."

Geography of Domain Names

2007-11-28T11:04:00.000+01:00

According to this article on Mappa Mundi there are currently over 18 million .com domains registered on the Internet, along with another 11 million domains of varying sorts. This map was compiled using the billing addresses of domains registered in Manhattan.

The internet as sketched-up buildings - SimCity-style

2007-11-01T09:49:00.000+01:00

Here's a site where blogs and websites can pay to register themselves as buildings on the "streets" of the internet. Looks like it's mostly caught on just in Russia and eastern Europe.
link via digg

Geography of Spam

2007-10-30T17:22:00.000+01:00

Brief piece from the Economist today showing the top spam-relaying countries.

Country codes of the world

2007-10-29T17:19:00.000+01:00

Map design by John Yunker showing relative sizes of top level domain country codes.
Each ccTLD is sized relative to the population of the country or territory, with the exception of China and India, which were restrained by 30% to fit the layout. At the other end of the spectrum, the smallest type size used reflects those countries with fewer than 10 million residents.
link via strange maps

Interactive IP Map

2007-10-17T11:17:00.000+02:00

There's another more interactive map out, similar to the ones I've posted before, using the Hilbert curve. Link here
We map all 4,294,967,296 IP addresses onto a huge image and let you zoom into it and pan around. Just like google maps, but more internetty.

Find your location on the internet

2007-10-10T08:59:00.003+02:00

This is a really great site that uses the famed xkcd comic representation of the internet and plots your location on that map.

UPDATE: A census of internet space modeled on this xkcd comic is out from the Information Sciences Institute.

UPDATE: Here's a great blog post on the ICANN blog that I missed when it first came out. The same structure of the XKCD comic and adds color to indicate regional allocations and free space.

Interconnection of Cities

2007-10-08T09:05:00.000+02:00

From Chris Harrison's site:
The Dimes Project provides several excellent data sets that describe the structure of the Internet. Using their most recent city edges data (Feb 2007), I created a set of visualizations that display how cities across the globe are interconnected (by router configuration and not physical backbone). In total, there are 89,344 connections.

Internet Availability Map

2007-09-14T15:26:00.000+02:00

A beautiful map by graphic designer Brian Christie showing the world in terms of internet availability. Link

Time Magazine's 50 Best Websites

2007-09-06T09:50:00.000+02:00

Old news, but here's Time's take on what's worth looking at on the web in 2007.

Internet Black Holes

2007-09-04T17:39:00.000+02:00

Here's a map circulating of the 15 internet-restricting countries...brought to us by Reporters without Borders. I saw it first from strange maps.

PC Magazine's 100 Undiscovered Websites

2007-08-30T15:02:00.000+02:00

Here's PC Magazine's 100 Undiscovered Websites, as well as their list of Classics.

Global distribution of internet users in 2005

2007-08-25T23:24:00.000+02:00

This map, published by ExploMap in 2005 using clickz data, shows the number of internet users by country, with each small grey box indicating 1 million users. Link

Who owns the internet?

2007-08-23T08:53:00.000+02:00

Here's a map of the 2006 internet color-coded by who the routers are registered to. link
Red = Verizon
Blue = AT&T
Yellow = Qwest
Green = Level 3, Sprint Nextel, others
Black = Cable industry
Gray = Other

TED's list of 100 Websites you should know

2007-08-05T09:58:00.001+02:00

TED has come out with a list of 100 websites you should know and use...not a map, but a nicely edited directory. link

Mapa Visual de la Web 2.0

2007-08-03T14:53:00.000+02:00

This is a well-edited depiction of Web 2.0 concepts and site links from Spain. link

Israeli Internet

2007-08-03T14:46:00.000+02:00

This posted by misteroo on flickr.

iA's Web Trend Map 2007

2007-07-23T19:20:00.000+02:00

2007's biggest websites depicted as a subway map, complete with weather outlook at each station. Go to the original clickable version on iA's site

Periodic table of the internet

2007-07-23T19:13:00.000+02:00

The major sites of the internet organized into a periodic table. Source: wellingtongrey.net via infosthetics.com

Map of the internet universe

2007-07-23T19:07:00.000+02:00

Jonathan Harris' Universe hardly could be called a map...it is a web geography interactive playland. Watch his talk introducing the project on Ted.

XKCD comic

2007-07-23T18:56:00.001+02:00

A very clever map of online communities. Source: xkcd.com via infosthetics.com

Internet as logo collection

2007-07-23T18:49:00.000+02:00

This is also not a map and has a cluttered feel, but does a good job of organizing top websites by category. Source: allmyfaves.com via infosthetics.com

The internet represented as a globe

2007-07-23T18:46:00.001+02:00

Of hundreds of globes on display at Worldprocessor.com (fantastic website), two depict the internet.

iA's 2006 ratings for websites

2007-07-23T18:34:00.000+02:00

Not a map, but a useful visual reference comparing popular sites across a number of criteria. They also rate news services, social networks, social linklists, corporate websites, and blogs. Check out the full page on iA.

World Map of Social Networks

2007-07-23T18:31:00.000+02:00

This map by Valleywag shows the dominant social networking service in major countries.

Polish Map of the Internet

2007-07-23T18:26:00.000+02:00

I can't read much of it, but it I can pick out the lands of 'Blogerra, Wikia, and Fotocz.'
From a Polish website.

First map of the internet?

2007-07-23T18:20:00.000+02:00

This is as sketch of the first node on ARPANET at UCLA September 2, 1969. From Peter Salus' book "Casting the Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and Beyond"