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Map of the Internet
Wellington Grey writes "Author of the popular webcomic xkcd has put up a hand made map of the internet as today's comic. He also has an interesting blog entry detailing some of the work that went into it, such a pinging servers and creating a method of fractal mapping to display related regions as contiguous sections on the grid." The drawing is pretty damn impressive; somebody get on making that thing a giant wall poster so I can paper over Taco's office door.
xkcd is a work of genius. See, for example, this classic.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Wow, I wish I was clever enough to come up with stuff like this.
The author gets additional Cleverness Points for thinking to post the geonetric locations of the major geek sites (slashdot, digg, boingboing, etc.) in order to encourage those sites to repost links to the author's website.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Thats neat, however opte.org is working on realtime maps of the internet.
But where's the "Here there be dragons" part?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I always laugh at how MIT half as much as all of latin america and as much as all of Africa.
I remember being in MIT and getting a real fixed IP for every single device. We actually had a coke vending machine that was hacked and online with its own IP. Considering they has so much that they are no where near running out, I'm sure there are a ton of toasters online at MIT as well.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I thought we were (supposedly) running out of IPv4 space... but the map shows quite a few unallocated blocks. What gives?
Although a map of the IP address space is probably more interesting and informative, something that was based on the distribution of domain names might be more appealing to a non-technical audience; perhaps something showing the relative size of various sites beneath each TLD, with some factor based on popularity and grouped by semantic distance and interlinking.
E.g., so you'd end up with something that had big regions for the major TLDs, and then within them you'd have semantically related regions (sites that are related based on keywords or link to each other heavily). The base unit could be sites, and their size would be proportional to their number of publicly-accessible pages times a 'popularity factor.' Maybe you could extract some of the popularity information from Google (not that they'd probably like you hitting them with a lot of scripted searches).
I think it would be neat, particularly if you ended up with something that showed such locales as the Spamblog Ghetto, Fortress Corporate America, and, of course, the Porn District.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In reality, the security of the girlfriend system is hardware-based; it requires the presence of a specialized dongle.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Isn't it kind of sad that the entire continent of Africa gets the same number of IP addresses that Prudential, an insurance company gets?
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Just float your mouse over the picture and he will tell you what the IPv6 version looks like.
;-)
Even more clever, and sooooo right
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
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