6 replies to this topic

[ELeFevre]

I had a chance last night to browse through "The Atlas of Cyberspace" by Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin. The graphics, maps, concepts, et cetera, behind this book are incredible.
Here is the link to the website


"The Atlas of Cyberspace illustrates graphically, the shapes, structures and complex forms of the Internet, the World-Wide Web and other virtual media. Drawing on five years worth of research, and divided into four key sections - infrastructure and traffic, information navigation, community and communication, artistic visions - the best and most interesting maps of cyberspace have been compiled into this unique atlas for the Internet age."

p.s. The website does not do the book justice. Erin

[Hans van der Maarel]

Somewhat related, and pretty cool in its own right, is this:
TouchGraph maps

It 'maps' websites that link to your own site.

[ELeFevre]

That's incredible, Hans. That link just found a permanent home in my bookmarks. I've never found a website that visualizes the link structure of a website. I wonder how they did it? Erin

[Hans van der Maarel]

Well, as far as I've been able to figure out, it uses Google to determine which sites are linking to a particular one (and which sites link to those sites) and probabely also how popular they are. The visualisation part is random, but it would be interesting to try and match this with 'geo-ip adresses', such as hostip or ip2location.

[ELeFevre]

That site raises some interesting questions and possibilities as to how we will search and visualize the internet in the future. Evententually it seems like the search engine interface is going to change into one that's more of a heirarchical 3d visualization of related categories, rather than lists of links that may or may not be related. Erin

[Hans van der Maarel]

Erin,

There is of course Kartoo, which is similar to TouchGraph, but much more a search-engine.

It's both interesting and difficult to think of the Internet in geographical terms. Difficult, because the geographic component isn't so important anymore.

[Lori Martin]

Interesting links! Certainly puts the internet into perspective!