Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Language on the Internet



This great article/project is home to a number of maps and animations all along the idea of an "internet archipelago." This one in particular looks at the internet through language:

"this mapping is limited to countries are home to a significant population speaking an internet language (a significant population is defined as at least 100,000 first tongue speakers). the political map of the world is rearranged based on internet language populations to create the language archipelago. the united states is placed at the center of the language archipelago for several reasons. it is the only country that has a significant population speaking all ten internet languages. it has the most extensive internet infrastructure. and it was the birthplace of the internet. from there, all the other internet countries are arranged in rays corresponding to the countries’ dominant internet language based on their ascendancy. the national flag at the end of each ray is used as a visual legend to key the ray’s language. this map illustrates the dominant role of the world’s superpowers on in internet and reveal the circumstance of countries at the periphery."

Geography of Domain Names



According to this article on Mappa Mundi there are currently over 18 million .com domains registered on the Internet, along with another 11 million domains of varying sorts. This map was compiled using the billing addresses of domains registered in Manhattan.

Thursday, November 1, 2007

The internet as sketched-up buildings - SimCity-style



Here's a site where blogs and websites can pay to register themselves as buildings on the "streets" of the internet. Looks like it's mostly caught on just in Russia and eastern Europe.
link via digg