The United States of Facebook

PeteSearch finds some patterns in the ways Facebook users are connected to each other:



The colored clumps represent areas within which users' friends tend to be found. That is, someone within Greater Texas, for instance, will tend to have more friends within that region than outside of it. Lines connect cities which tend to have more friend connections.

Says Pete: "Some of these clusters are intuitive, like the old south, but there's some surprises too, like Missouri, Louisiana and Arkansas having closer ties to Texas than Georgia." On Stayathomia:

Stretching from New York to Minnesota, this belt's defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don't move far. In most cases outside the largest cities, the most common connections are with immediately neighboring cities, and even New York only has one really long-range link in its top 10. Apart from Los Angeles, all of its strong ties are comparatively local.

In contrast to further south, God tends to be low down the top 10 fan pages if she shows up at all, with a lot more sports and beer-related pages instead.

On Dixie:

Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country. Atlanta is definitely the hub of the network, showing up in the top 5 list of almost every town in the region. Southern Florida is an exception to the cluster, with a lot of connections to the East Coast, presumably sun-seeking refugees.

God is almost always in the top spot on the fan pages, and for some reason Ashley shows up as a popular name here, but almost nowhere else in the country.

On Mormonia: "It's worth separating from the rest of the West because of how interwoven the communities are, and how relatively unlikely they are to have friends outside the region." The Nomadic West has much longer lines of connection than other regions, which is not terribly surprising. Socalistan is not simply Californiastan (or California for that matter) because the center of gravity clearly bends LA-wards. And Pete observes that Pacifica is "the most boring of the clusters."

All this, Pete notes, is "qualitative, not quantitative," so data caveat emptor and all that. Still, an interesting representation.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

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 Revolution Will Be Variously Represented

Jeff Clark has made a word cloud of tweets from Iran:



Says Clark:

This is a Shaped Word Cloud created from the text of approximately 84,000 tweets containing the term #iranelection. The larger the word the more frequently it appears in the text. As usual you can click on a word to see the current twitter search results.

He's also maintaining a running tweet narrative that uses an algorithm to create a sort of synecdoche of tweets from Iran. Very interesting.

Maps Can Save the World

Or make it a bit better, at least. The Economist has an article this week about using mapping tools for political advocacy. Here, for instance, is a map of Los Angeles that shows that areas with more parks (darker green) have lower rates of childhood obesity (smaller circles):



Says The Economist:

mapping technology has matured into a tool for social justice. Whether it is to promote health, safety, fair politics or a cleaner environment, foundations, non-profit groups and individuals around the world are finding that maps can help them make their case far more intuitively and effectively than speeches, policy papers or press releases.

“Today you are allowed to visualise data in ways you couldn’t even understand just a few years ago,” says Jeff Vining of Gartner, a consulting firm. Along with web-based resources, coalescence around more advanced tools has also helped, such as the emergence of ESRI, based in Redlands, California, as the market leader in mapping software. And the rise of open-source projects such as MapServer, PostGIS and GRASS GIS have made sophisticated mapping available to non-profit groups with limited resources.

I think what you've got here is another case where the proliferation of technology and information has a democratizing effect in that it allows people the means to form a clearer view of the world, and by extension a better understanding of how to redress injustices, improve their lives, or just become aware of opportunities which previously would have been obscure to them. New technologies don't always have such propitious effects, but this is one case where they do. Also note that maps are great.

Via gvlt.

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.

Open Source Map of the World

Redhat.com has an interactive map ranking the world's countries (a goodly portion of them, at any rate) by their amenity to open sourciness.



The map is based on the Open Source Index, which was put together by researchers at Georgia Tech. Says redhat:

The OSI is a measure of the open source activity and environment in 75 countries. Each country is given a score based on its policies, practices, and other data in the fields of Government, Industry, and Community.

Click on a country to see the country's rank (1 being the highest, 75 being the lowest) in open source activity. One map shows Activity, which measures the amount of open source happening today. It tends to be made up of concrete factors, such as existing open source and open standards policies and number of OSS users, such as Linux and Google.

You can also see an Environmental map, which is more speculative. Even a country that does not have a high degree of current penetration of open source may have a high number of internet users and information technology patents. These factors may indicate a favorable environment for open source software to take hold.

Clicking on a country will show its overal open source ranking among the 75 countries rated, as well as its ranking in government, industry, and community factors. Government factors include official policies; industry factors include "the number of registered OSS users per capita and internet growth"; and community factors include "the number of applications to the Google summer of code, native language support for GNU/Linux, and number of Internet users per capita."

The number one overall ranking goes to France, followed by Spain, Germany, Australia, Finland, Great Britain, Norway, Estonia, the US, and Denmark. Moldova's 75th best. Out of 75.

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:

Mapping the Conficker Worm

Via PCMag's Security Watch blog, the Conficker Working Group has infection maps of the Conficker worm, which is some sort of centipedal beast that feasts on the souls of computers or something.



The map is based on infection rates as of April 1st. This caveat is given:

While the maps appear very detailed, the mapping process itself is somewhat inaccurate. Each area of color is a spot that must be placed and then a range of color applied based off the density of data in that spot. So, the greater the scale of the map there is an increased bleed effect of the applied dots and distribution. Areas can appear far more infected than they are in actuality. So we present the maps as something to see within those limitations and built-in levels of inaccuracy.

Still, some patterns are evident. As the Security Watch blog post notes, the infection rate seems to be much denser in Italy than in France.



The blog also gives rates of infection for some countries; the winner is Vietnam, with a rate above 13%, followed by Brazil and the Phillipines at 11%. The US is at 4.7%, and Italy has the highest infection rate in Europe at 3.6%. (It's not clear to me, though, whether these numbers represent the percent of all infected systems that reside in a given country, or the percent of systems in the given country that are infected.)