Slashdot Mirror
Charting Virtual Worlds
Myrioandme writes "Since the inception of the Internet, cybergeographers have been trying to draw maps of cyberspace. The results have been mixed, but a new book brings together some of the most interesting -- and breathtaking -- maps of virtual worlds. Wired is carrying the full story."
"We're still looking for the Mercator projection of cyberspace. We're not there yet. The map of the Web is still waiting to be drawn."
Its the Web. How about ditching the paper and using a VR approach? As in, take advantage of tech, rather than just "appreciate them artistically".
1Alpha7
Live to be Moderated
I suppose a geographer could look at the slashdot effect as equivelant to a 'random natural disaster' when mapping out the web.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
But we are not their yet. We are all way too much individuals to be a truly coherent group mind.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Check out the latest:
h tm l
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/fun-stuff/573c.s
It's also a good example of yet another style of internet map, different from those shown in the wired story.
what the point of this book is?
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
Sorry, don't know how that space got in there. This is the correct link:
h tm l
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/fun-stuff/573c.s
um
interesting. It keeps putting that space in there by itself. Slashcode bug? I don't know. Anyways, you can all figure it out, I'm sure.
RFC 432 contains one of the oldest maps of the internet, with only a couple of hosts.
rfc432 in pdf format
This is a replacement signature.
Well there are some really cool maps out there. There is this one site with all these maps, i cant remember it, like www.something ology.com. Anyone know what this site is? It has some awsome maps, and some of those site tracing software.
Gaming Shizzle
Another interestring web site about that topic is mappa mundi.
Is that second screenshot taken using 3DWM?
Filler. Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted. Filler. Apple. Potato. Tomato.
Which brings up another, slightly OT point, What the Hell is the Lamness filter supposed to accomplish? I mean with the AC posting, what great harm does the Lameness Filter intend to save us from...?
Here is a link to Google's cached copy of a previous Wired article on Web Stalker, the software used to make the black-and-white Spirograph-esque image in the Wired article above. The Web Stalker software itself can be found here, but for Windows and MacOS only, alas.
This is not a Fugazi
The maps of the internet, while very pretty, are not very useful except to see how certain domains connect to others. What we need for a really good/nifty map would be a chart of the connections based on content or meaning.
This would be pretty tricky, however there are a few things you could do to handle the meanings of pages without having a very complex AI:
1. Run a thesaurus through a semiotic field, so words are reduced to meaning groups. Each word gets turned into a symbol during spidering. The meaning groups could then be profiled into what the subject matter is, regardless of the language or location, with reasonable accuracy.
2. Assign a color to each major page class: Search Engine, Commercial, Personal, Regional. The content could then be made into a pretty circle graph like the previous one, and you could make it browsable on the web to spot the "importance" of certain sites as information resources.
3. For even more fun things to do, make the electronic version of the web map reducible. Web portals already show categorical listings of web content, so why not make it possible to select different sub-categories from the higher levels and make the rest white?
I think that a graphical search engine like this would be a fancy toy, and might actually provide a useful interface for old people and those with a more tactile/visual/geographic view of the world.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
This seems pretty damn cool from a desktop-wallpaper point of view, but how practical is this?
;).
The 'net is pretty fluid and dynamic, as companies are going bankrupt and starting up all the time. Soon we'll be able to build the map from just a couple of major carriers' networks
Seriously, these things are probably outdated as soon as they're finished. What are the chances of a real-time distributed mapping effort, where networks are dynamically scanned and the data is collated every few days on a few central nodes? It would be very interesting to see not just how the 'net is wired, but to view the shifting dynamics of traffic and connections in a handy animated format.
Sites like Internet Traffic Report get a little bit of the way there, but are too numeric. Ideas?
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
Dig?
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Wouldn't this be next to useless? Cartographers draw maps of the real world because they do not change very quickly. A map of America will still be fairly correct in 10,000 years time.
Imagine what the map of the Internet drawn just 5 years ago would have looked like compared to todays?
DWIM (Do What I Mean) sucks. Having a fuckload of AI just to save him the trouble of typing about twelve more characters is not a good idea.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''If your interested playing around with some internet mapping software, Gnucleus will map out some gnutella hosts around you.
Check out a picture of me running gnucleus. gnucleus.jpg
They're nice to look at but is it really useful to represent the internet in this way? Surely there is a more meaningful representation that is of equal or greater esthetic value. Perhaps a rendering similar to the constructs associated with Everything2. This could be achieved through analysis and visualization of the relevence data used by Google and Teoma to generate their results, where significant material is emphesized. Granted this would not produce a network map, but rather a contant map, ilustrating regional housing of particularly meaningful or valuable content. It would however, include content available using any protocol for which there is a URL representation.
Granted content pamming is not what they were going for, but it would have the side effect of displaying network topology with respect to relitive routing and bandwith capacities (utilization anyway).
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Hardly. The wired article, barely 200 words, doesn't even begin to explain why someone would want to map cyberspace.
This pretty old NY Times article (http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/go/recognition/nytimes0 999.htm) explains things much better. And I'm sure there are even better references out there.
I can see the use of Network Maps, ISP's connection maps to the Internet, maybe a map of the Root Name Servers and what ISP's connect to which, but for god sakes a map of the internet. It sounds like something they would talk about on an AOL chat room while being no where NEAR the internet.
Now, maybe I paid too close attention to my physics and EE classes, but they might as well ask "What does an electron taste like?" (Yes, I know it's grape-aid)
A conceptual map of the internet would be useful for helping to grasp the concept of the amorphous monstrousity the 'net is, but I'm worried that these electronic cartographers are going in the wrong direction. It's nice that 16th century cartographers put in all those pretty sea serpents and mermaids, but that still doesn't change the facts that South America looks nothing like that, there's a whole other continent in the South Pacific, and there's no Northwest Passage.
If I'm looking at a map, I don't care what the map is going to look like in 5 years, or what it looked like 5 years ago. I care what the map is telling me now. Now, what kind of information you can get out of an internet map is another story.
I thought the funniest part was when I clicked on the Amazon link from the Atlas of Cyberspace site to find out how much the book was, I then selected find "Loosely Related" items to this book. Some of the results were
- O Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD
- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon DVD
- Microsoft FrontPage 2002 Upgrade
But anyways, the pictures do look pretty cool.
KidA
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
I was always wondering if each node in the network were a small neural network that responded to input received from the net, would the packets passed between them be considered "thought"?
And, if it is, what would such a network be thinking about?
Anyway...food for thought.
Those disgusted with this crap can forward the information to the FBI. The more people the better.
These are pretty pictures, but in general, trying to embed this kind of information in 2-space (or 3-space, for that matter - adding a dimension doesn't really help) is mostly futile.
I learned much more from the "bowtie" representation of the Web (that study that - roughly - divided Websites into a "mainstream", sites that linked into the mainstream but were not linked to from it, sites that were linked from the mainstream but didn't link back into it, and sites that were in isolated islands). That was nice, and used some smart analysis, rather than a huge dump of complex information onto the printed page.
Not really just straight-forward maps of the internet. On the authors web page, there's a bunch of others too, like kernel maps of linux and artistic interpretations of various networks. Some are pretty, go check it out.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
"And, if it is, what would such a network be thinking about?"
Sex. Just like everybody else. Especially on the internet.
You can get the software ("Web Stalker" aka IOD4)used in making one of those images at http://bak.spc.org/iod/archive.html - sorry, mac and windows only. It lets you basically type a starting URL and then watch the map grow as it is generated - the image I got from using slashdot was quite interesting.
Well, as long as the article fits on one page. Wired's links to other pages of an article includes code to break out of frames, which wrecks my web navigation Javascript frame, which messes up my daily scanning of favorite sites. Wired would be a favorite if it wasn't for that...
It's also interesting to check how the internet have expanded just over some years, thinkgeek has some cool maps over how internet looked in the years 1999, 2000 and also for the year 2001. These are graphs of how the Internet might look if you were a packet of data that were sent thru the bulk of the Internet infrastructure.
Also read more about the company Lumeta that has a long-term research project to collect routing data on the Internet, it's called The Internet Mapping Project. They have some information there about how it is done too.
2 reptiles beneath your current threshold.
Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the Internet Outback Safari. I'm your tour guide, Aligator Hunter and of course you all know my nephew, Crocadile Hunter.
On you left is a dot.com tech company. While once they roamed this jungle, they now are on the brink of extinction. Similar to the dodo bird, they animals were born with no sense of self-preservation.
You'll see up ahead the mating ritual of several humans. This is what's known as a porn site. Crikey! Would you look at that! That's the biggest mating orgy I've seen! Oiy!
Moving on, we see slashdot.org. Folks, I would like to take this moment to remind you all to keep your hands inside the vehicle and by all means, Don't Feed the Trolls! If my nephew C. Hunter were here, he'd get one in a headlock so you fine folks could get a closer view.
This concludes our first leg of the trip. Up ahead you'll see a tourist stand with OFF flame spray (tm) which is quite useful to repell flaming trolls. Also, dont forget to pick up a colorful map of the Internet Outback. We meet back in 30 minutes. Have fun.
If you want the online version of this book, visit cybergeography.org or join the mailing list. Also check out mappa.mundi.net for well written and researched articles on related topics. Martin Dodge, author of this book, contributes monthly columns about cyberspace maps.
Imagine the problems that terrorists could do with something like the maps on http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/cables.html and the information on http://www.iscpc.org/
Major trunk lines in many places. Granted, these often do not locate the lines with enough precision to accurately locate and take out, but they are a start. I am sure that a search of local utilities and maps available to the public could locate things fairly well.
What could be done to secure these?
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
to get done with us.. then we'll all be mindless clones connected by .Net..
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
I think I just found a new way to wallpaper my apartment.. woo!
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
> "Have you ever wondered what a data packet might actually look like as it zips along the phone line? What physical form might it take?"
It looks like a fragment of The Matrix code of course!
-- Mike
Plus, you could acquire this relevant, descriptive set of URLs from us (including a year's free hosting), as a result of your interest, & your ability to follow simple directions.
don't even try to tell US that you haven't seen these guys, now featuring pictures of the REAL .commIEs
Fuck you GNU Hippie.
I find it mildly amusing that a company whose software is designed to help people steal intellectual property acts in this manner. Remember when Napster tried to sue people for selling Napster t-shirts? Hahaha.
Did they mention the answer? Warriors of the net is a 12 minute animated introduction to the travels of a packet across the 'net.
May I highlight the word "introduction".
Don't forget Mappa.mundi, they've been selecting maps and running features on them for a long while. A good selection to choose from.
It may just be me, but doesn't this one map set look suspiciously like the startup screens for the XBox? :) Microsoft is taking over the internet after all.
Has anyone else noticed that in this photo from the wired article there appears to be more web traffic at the north pole than in all of europe?
Maybe it's Santa's database tracking the naughty/nice data on all the children. It's a pretty serious privacy violation to collect personal information from children under 13 without a parent's consent.
"I'm sorry Tommy, Santa's not bringing you any presents this year. He's in jail."
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The most beautiful should be this:
m y. pdf
http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/linux_anato
Ok, just an opinion.
I suppose a geographer could look at the slashdot effect as equivelant to a 'random natural disaster' when mapping out the web.
It's hardly random - in fact, it's highly predictable that whenever some poor website gets highlighted on /., it's basically doomed...
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Hover Your mouse over the left-most image on Wired, and it (probably - depends on browser version) explains that traffic is depicted as skyscrapers, with North America having really big ones. Just the type of imaging effect to use these days, I guess...
Black holes are where God divided by zero
These maps could get much better in the future, especially if some new router protocols are developed that can report how much traffic is travelling through their individual lines. You could then colour code the links by traffic passing through them at a particular time. Red = very active, blue = idle. The backbones would be immediately obvious. This would also create a better map. The problem with the current maps is that they are generated using traceroute. This has the effect of making a few sites look very well connected when, in fact, they are simply the searching computers. By getting the routers themselves to divulge information about each link, you would get a complete map of the whole public internet. This may be possible now, I don't know much about BGP and its friends. Anywho, something to think about.
I suppose this could be used in charting traffic for telecommunications purposes, but otherwise, for a common user, it seems about as useful as charting a telephone book.
http://cyberatlas.guggenheim.org/home/index.html
Enjoy, Michael