Time lapse internet growth

"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."

Apple HQ App Store Visualization

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

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.

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?

Longitudinal View

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

Opte Project

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.

Interactive IP Map

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

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.

Who owns the internet?

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

First map of the internet?

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"