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."
Check out the latest:
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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.
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
Dig?
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
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.
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.