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."

DeviantArt Map

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

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

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

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

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

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.