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."

Comments

They're beautiful, but are these maps useful?

[hillct]

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

Re:Things to consider

[grammar nazi]

I think that we should wait until the net is more similar to a Distributed-MMORG before we create detailed maps of it. After all, we currently don't need to try and find our way around the net in a 2 dimensional manner for which we commonly use maps as tools.

Once we have more of a virtual world, then the maps can contain land, portals, regions with boundaries (private networks would be similar to a border that we didn't know or couldn't map what was contained within.

As far as physiscal geography of the servers goes, this will become less and less of an issue as the physical content of the Net becomes distributed accross borders and servers. Of course, this is an optimistic view, but I'm entitled to it.