The "Politicosphere"

I've posted before on a map of the Iranian blogosphere. But now I discover, via Matt Yglesias, that PoliticoSphere.net has such a map for the US:



The map represents the "612 most visible and influential websites and blogs." Each node represents a website, and the sizes of nodes are determined by number of inbound links. Colors represent ideological or issues orientation; here's what they mean:

Green - Environment and Energy
Pink - Feminism
Brown - Defense
Orange - Education
Light blue - Health Policy
Peach - International Affairs
Gray - Law
Red - Conservative
Blue - Liberal
Yellow - Infopros (sites like Huffington Post and TPM, as well as mainstream media sites)

At the PoliticoSphere site, you can click on nodes to show the corresponding sites' links to other sites. Unrelatedly, the map seems to be shaped like a hawk in flight or the nation of Kyrgyzstan.

The Sun Never Sets on Facebook

Via Andrew Sullivan, Vincos Blog has a world map of social networking sites:


With areas of dominance in North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia, Facebook is the clear imperial hegemon in the world of social networking (and all that is despite its having one of the dumbest names in the business). But, according to Vincos, it is not actually the largest social networking site in the world; that superlative belongs to QQ, which dominates China with "300 million active accounts."

Good ol' Friendster, meanwhile, has been pushed back - a bit oddly - to a final redoubt in the Philippines. Hi5, which I had never heard of, has probably the weirdest distribution of strength: it's tops in Mexico and Central America, Ecuador and Peru, Portugal, Cameroon, Romania, Thailand, and Mongolia - and nowhere else. I defy you to find the family resemblance that ties that group of countries together.

There are several country or language-specific networks that are king in just one nation: Hyves in the Netherlands, CyWorld in South Korea, iWiW in Hungary, and Mixi in Japan, among others. A few networks are popular across a cultural region, like Maktoob in the Middle East, V Kontakte in the core areas of the former Soviet Union, and Odnoklassniki in the more peripheral areas of same. MySpace, meanwhile, has fallen from its perch everywhere but Guam.

Mapping the Internet

Here's a fun Flickr slideshow of people's personal maps of the internet. One example:



It's a project by writer Kevin Kelly, who says:

The internet is vast. Bigger than a city, bigger than a country, maybe as big as the universe. It's expanding by the second. No one has seen its borders.

And the internet is intangible, like spirits and angels. The web is an immense ghost land of disembodied places. Who knows if you are even there, there.

Yet everyday we navigate through this ethereal realm for hours on end and return alive. We must have some map in our head.

I've become very curious about the maps people have in their minds when they enter the internet. So I've been asking people to draw me a map of the internet as they see it. That's all. More than 50 people of all ages and levels of expertise have mapped their geography of online.

Spirits and angels? I might have gone with 'credit' or 'waste' or some other intangibles that don't sound quite so froufy. But then, "the internet is intangible, like credit and waste" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, I suppose.

Anyways, it's a fun project. And you can take part, too, if you want.

The Iranian Blogosphere

From Harvard (or, as the Russians say, "Garvard"), a map of Iran's online discourse:



The data represented here are part of a series in the internet and democracy project. Here's the abstract:

We used computational social network mapping in combination with human and automated content analysis to analyze the Iranian blogosphere. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that Iranian bloggers are mainly young democrats critical of the regime, we found a wide range of opinions representing religious conservative points of view as well as secular and reform-minded ones, and topics ranging from politics and human rights to poetry, religion, and pop culture. Our research indicates that the Persian blogosphere is indeed a large discussion space of approximately 60,000 routinely updated blogs featuring a rich and varied mix of bloggers. Social network analysis reveals the Iranian blogosphere to be dominated by four major network formations, or poles, with identifiable sub-clusters of bloggers within those poles. We label the poles as 1) Secular/Reformist, 2) Conservative/Religious, 3) Persian Poetry and Literature, and 4) Mixed Networks. (View the full map / view the full map in Persian.) The secular/reformist pole contains both expatriates and Iranians involved in a dialog about Iranian politics, among many other issues. The conservative/religious pole contains three distinct sub-clusters, two focused principally on religious issues and one on politics and current affairs. Given the repressive political and media environment, and high profile arrests and harassment of bloggers, one might not expect to find much political contestation in the blogosphere. However, we identified a subset of the secular/reformist pole focused intently on politics and current affairs and comprised mainly of bloggers living inside Iran, which is linked in contentious dialog with the conservative political sub-cluster. Surprisingly, a minority of bloggers in the secular/reformist pole appear to blog anonymously, even in the more politically-oriented part of it; instead, it is more common for bloggers in the religious/conservative pole to blog anonymously. Blocking of blogs by the government is less pervasive than we had assumed. Most of the blogosphere network is visible inside Iran, although the most frequently blocked blogs are clearly those in the secular/reformist pole. Given the repressive media environment in Iran today, blogs may represent the most open public communications platform for political discourse. The peer-to-peer architecture of the blogosphere is more resistant to capture or control by the state than the older, hub and spoke architecture of the mass media model.

Kind of appreciate the prominence given to poetry in the Iranian blogosphere. On behalf of the English-language blogosphere, let me just say: we really are philistines.

Web Trends IV

Information Architects, an entity I've never heard of, is about to release the fourth version of their web trends map, which, though evidently quite popular, is another thing I've never heard of. But here's the thing: it's a map! And so, I present it to you:



According to IA, the map depicts the

333 most influential Web domains and the 111 most influential internet people [in a visualization based on] the Tokyo Metro map.

Domains are carefully selected by the iA research team through dialogue with map enthusiasts. Each domain is evaluated based on traffic, revenue, age and the company that owns it. The iA design team assigns these selected domains to individual stations on the Tokyo Metro map in ways that complement the characters of each.

I'm actually more interested in the allegorical aspect of this project than the actual content; how did they match up web domains with Tokyo Metro stops? They give this example: "Twitter is in Shibuya this year, as Shibuya is the spot with the bigggest buzz." Hard to draw any generalizable principles from that case. Like, in what sense does deviantart.com resemble Ueno station? Is the area around Ueno populated by a lot of manga characters and amateur photographers?

Regardless, the folks at IA know what they're about when it comes to extending an allegory; just about everything in this visualization is, as the semioticians like to say, a signifier. To wit: a station's height represents a site's "success," where success "refers not only to traffic, but to revenue and trend." The width of a station "represents the stability of the company behind its domain" - Digg gets a wide base; 4chan, not so much. And each of the lines represent a certain type of site, as you can see in the key to the left there.

They're selling posters of the thing, but only about 1,000 of them. If I was you, and also was desperately keen on getting my hands on one of these, I would be irked by their transparent effort to foment demand by artificially limiting supply of their product. In a fit of pique, I would then go buy a poster from Le Dernier Cri which, though completely unrelated to both webs and trends, has a bunch of fun stuff. That would show 'em.

Or, you could just go here and see the beta version for yourself. Here's a detail: