Geek Heaven: The Map of the Internet

I remember back in the days when I didn’t have a computer at home with Internet access. My first ISP was Mindspring, and to this day, I still have my first Mindspring email address. I pay extra each month just to keep it. I’m a sucker for anything retro and nostalgic, including email addresses.

It’s so strange because kids these days are the first generation of true digital natives, and they will never know life without the Internet, well, unless someday in the future it’s gone. Richard wrote an article the other day about what life might be like without Google.

Have you ever thought about what the Internet looks like? We all think of it as being a resource for information, but what if we had to assign a physical description to it? How would it look? Would it be a massive ball of confusion? Or could it be like the galaxy in Men In Black… a tiny compact world that would fit in our hand? Peer 1 Hosting decided to take on the job of showing us all what the Internet looks like. Hmm… It’s not quite what I had expected. The Internet is such a big part of my life, and I thought for sure it would be covered in chocolate or at least have a smile face on it.

If you want to know what you’re looking at, according to Peer 1, “The image depicts a graph of 19,869 autonomous system nodes, joined by 44,344 connections.” It uses the same graph-theoretical concept that forms the basis of Google’s PageRank algorithm. You can head on over to Peer 1 Hosting’s website for more geekilicious details. You can also download the high-resolution PDF. Enjoy!