The Internet Map (http://internet-map.net/) is a cool new website which maps the top 350,000 sites on the internet by similarity and popularity. According to Gizmodo, ”each site is represented by a circle whose size depends on the amount of traffic, and the space between each one is determined by the frequency with which users jump from one to another.” Furthermore, websites are clustered together according to their content. Quoting Ruslan Enikeev, the site’s developer:
As one might have expected, the largest clusters are formed by national websites, i.e. sites belonging to one country. For the sake of convenience, all websites relative to a certain country carry the same color. For instance, the red zone at the top corresponds to Russian segment of the net, the yellow one on the left stands for the Chinese segment, the purple one on the right is Japanese, the large light-blue central one is the American segment, etc.
Importantly, clusters on the map are semantically charged, i.e. they join websites together according to their content. For example, a vast porno cluster can be seen between Brazil and Japan as well as a host of minor clusters uniting websites of the same field or similar purposes.
Being a typical Generation-Y narcissist, I immediately rushed to check where C-Section Comics is located. Here are some photos (click each photo for a larger image):
C-Section Comics is a relatively small planet, orbiting the gas giant Reddit (that’s the giant light blue planet left of us).
Zooming out, we could see that we are located in a cluster which (as far as I can tell) contains mainly geeky image based sites. Geekologie and Dorkly are geek blogs (lots of tech and gadget related stuff), while Threadless.com is a “design a T-shirt” site which contains lots of geek designs.
Zooming out farther, we are now viewing a cluster which mainly consists American image based sites. 9GAG, Reddit, Tumblr, Imgur, Flickr, etc. (I’m not really sure what “American” means here – 9GAG for example is based in Hong Kong. I assume ”American” indicates where the majority of the website’s crowd comes from).
You can explore the map yourself and find where your favorite sites are located by visiting http://internet-map.net/
And if you find any interesting insights, please share them with the rest of the class.
