Like all maps, this map of the Internet shows where things are in relation to one another; in this case, websites. But how do you determine which website goes where, and how do you visualize something that is so abstract?
It turns out some classical physics are involved. In the map's "About" page, the author describes how every website functions as an electrically charged body. Originally the map consisted of 350,000 websites randomly scattered about the map. But over time websites are drawn together according to the number of users going from one site to another, which creates links. This naturally groups similar websites together. The size of the website's circle on the map is based on traffic data, while the color represents the website's country of origin. Because users generally visit other sites in their own language instead of visiting foreign ones, websites which share the same country of origin tend to group together.
The Internet Map shows a state of equilibrium -- the state at which the forces of attraction created by links between site traffic and the forces of repulsion between sites have reached a halt.
American websites in blue, both in size and number, dominate the center of the map. Though the map was created based on data from 2011, the majority of major Internet powerhouses are well represented here: Twitter, Facebook, Google and Youtube. To the left in yellow are Chinese websites, which make up a substantial part of the map with a number of large sites second only to giant American sites like Google. Purple on the right hand side of the map represents Japanese sites, red at the top of the map are Russian sites and green represents sites of Indian origin.
Since the data is from 2011, it isn't entirely accurate nearly three years later. Sites like Twitter will surely have grown in size, while streaming site Twitch.tv (which Amazon recently purchased for almost a billion dollars) doesn't exist at all. Chinese websites have surely grown in power in the past three years as well.
"The Internet global network is a phenomenon of technological civilization, and its exceptional complexity surpasses anything mankind has ever created," says the Internet Map's about page. "In essence, what we are dealing with here is a huge quantity of utterly unstructured information. The Internet map is an attempt to look into the hidden structure of the network, fathom its colossal scale, and examine that which is impossible to understand from the bare figures of statistics."
Despite being a little outdated, it still is a powerful visualization of a virtual realm that has been, and will continue to be, a dominant force in our lives.
