Internet Geography

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

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.

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."

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

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.

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

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."

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 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.

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."

Venn Diagram in Search of Accurate Information on the Internet

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

A little humor from Bunny Comics.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."