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."

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."