The Map of the Internet

The Map of the Internet is an ambitious project from Peer 1 Hosting that maps the network of hosts and routing connections that are the foundation of the Internet.  Clicking on the image above takes you to the poster in an interactive zooming viewer so you can see the details.  You can also read about the making of the poster in this post on the Peer 1 Hosting blog.

It’s a layout of all the networks that are interconnected to form the internet. Some are run by small and large ISPs, university networks, and customer networks - such as Facebook and Google. It’s visual representation of all those networks interconnecting with one another, forming the internet as we know it. Based on the size of the nodes and the thickness of the lines, it speaks to the size of those particular providers and the connections. 

In technical speak, you’re looking at all the autonomous systems that make up the internet. Each autonomous system is a network operated by a single organization, and has routing connections to some number of neighbouring autonomous systems. The image depicts a graph of 19,869 autonomous system nodes, joined by 44,344 connections. The sizing and layout of the autonomous systems is based on their eigenvector centrality, which is a measure of how central to the network each autonomous system is: an autonomous system is central if it is connected to other autonomous systems that are central.

My apologies for being late posting this one here on the blog.  They were giving out free printed 24”x36” posters at SxSW in Austin, TX a couple weeks ago, but the high-resolution PDF is available from the Peer 1 Hosting site.

Thanks to Shobhita for sending me the information and the link!

InMaps: Viewing Your Business Network

The new LinkedIN Maps is a very cool interactive infographic that visualizes your own LinkedIN network.  The InMaps pull data from your own LinkedIN profile when you allow access, so you can only see your own network.  

The connections are grouped into clusters based on shared connections and companies.  You can see above that my network has a few clearly defined clusters, but then a large blue area that has no clear cluster information.  You can also learn about you network with some of the visual data built into the map.  People with bigger dots and their names in larger fonts have more connections.

It’s interactive, so you can zoom in to see the individual names, and if you click on a connection, it highlights all of their connections as well.

Check out the quick, descriptive video from LinkedIn’s chief scientist DJ Patil:

For some reason, it doesn’t show every connection between people.  There are a few people in my network that I know are also connected to each other; however, the map didn’t show any connection between them.  Not sure what’s going behind the scenes.

You can publicly share your map on Twitter, Facebook and of course LinkedIN when you click the share buttons.  Here’s mine.  This creates a static image with a legend if you have named your color-coded clusters.  Clicking on the map takes readers to the front page to create their own, but clicking on your name takes them to your LinkedIN profile page.

You can also see some other anonymous maps on the front page by clicking on the “Next Map” button which will change to the background map image.

This one has been popular.  Found on FlowingData, VizWorld, Infosthetics and Mashable.