Finding Asia’s Place on the Internet World Map

internet-map.net

I’m a big fan of any visualization that gives me a better idea of what the Internet looks like and one Russian web developer has created a beautiful two-dimensional representation of the internet’s 350,000 biggest websites from all over the world. The creator of this map, Ruslan Enikeev, explains the visualization thusly:

Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.

As you might expect, websites from the English language dominate, but it’s interesting to look at some Asian regions, like China and Japan for example.

China (click to enlarge)

If we look at China (see right) you can see companies like Baidu and QQ.com are pretty huge, with portal sites like Sina and 163 standing out, as well as microblog service Weibo.com. Meanwhile Yahoo rules Japan, with fc2, Livedoor, Ameblo, and Mixi showing as big web destinations too. What about Korea? Naver, Google Korea, and Daum are all big players there.

Japan (click to enlarge)

Korea (click to enlarge)

Admittedly, the searches for countries like India and Indonesia don’t appear to give tidy ‘pockets’ like the countries mentioned above. While I don’t know why this is for sure, it could mean that those countries are more integrated with the rest of the internet.