In another case of something that you might spend hours poring over simply because you can, here's a giant map of the internet that will show you exactly how significant your website is in relation to the rest of those on the web.
So as much fun as it is to look at at guess which site is which (this would be the kind of drinking game that would kill its participants, by the way), what's the real point of this thing?
From the Internet Map's "About" section:
Like any other map, The Internet map is a scheme displaying objects’ relative position; but unlike real maps (e.g. the map of the Earth) or virtual maps (e.g. the map of Mordor), the objects shown on it are not aligned on a surface. Mathematically speaking, The Internet map is a bi-dimensional presentation of links between websites on the Internet. 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....
The Internet global network is a phenomenon of technological civilization, and its exceptional complexity surpasses anything mankind has ever created. In essence, what we are dealing with here is a huge quantity of utterly unstructured information. The Internet map is an attempt to look into the hidden structure of the network, fathom its colossal scale, and examine that which is impossible to understand from the bare figures of statistics.
So there you have it. It's a tool to try and gain understanding of what links us all on the internet. Aside from HTML code.
(For the record, TucsonWeekly.com is an itty-bitty little teal dot caught somewhere in the gravity between aol.com and the Huffington Post. There's worse company to be in, right?)
