Social Web Involvement Visualization

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

Good Morning Twitter

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."

Submarine Cable System Infographic

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."

The Internet in 1901

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

Akamai Visualizations

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Mapping the Digital Divide in Africa

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.

Distribution of NY Times Online news

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

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

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.

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

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"

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.

Geographic preferences for social networking platforms

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

Country domain mapping

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