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"

Visual Search Engines

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

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

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

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

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

The latest and greatest from information architects. Link.