World City To City Internet Map
I’m pretty sure this is the prettiest geeky thing I’ve seen:
Courtesy of Chris Harrison, the map above shows city to city connectivity on the internet:
I should note this is not the first time graphs like this have been created - I’ve seen dozens of variations, most being practical in nature (e.g. cable locations, bandwidth). I decided to pursue an aesthetic approach - one more visually intriguing and interesting to explore than useful. The intensity of edge contrast reflects the number of connections between the two points. No country borders or geographic features are shown. However, it should be fairly easy to orient yourself.
Based on The Dimes Project, which provides several excellent data sets that describe the structure of the Internet Chris has used their most recent city edges data (Feb 2007) and created a set of visualizations that display how cities across the globe are interconnected (by router configuration and not physical backbone). In total, there are 89,344 connections.
Check out Chris’ page for more details and maps including european cities and density of connections.