Mapping the Internet

I just discovered "The Internet Mapping Project" on Flickr today. One is prompted to draw a map of the internet, as they see it, and indicate their "home." Some of the maps are extremely similar to a sketch that I have created and my overall vision for the 3D Internet Visualization project. To quote Kevin Kelly, the site's creator:


"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."


Here is my concept sketch of the Internet:

Each sphere represents a different website. The radius and position of each sphere could be determined by data such as global internet rank, pageviews and Google PageRank. The surface of each sphere in this sketch is a stylized representation of the website itself, but in practice could be either a screenshot of the website in question, a favicon (that little 16x16 pixel icon to the left of the URL) or a color that changes depending on traffic data. All of these variables and attributes are still somewhat up in the air and will depend on what looks best after experimentation.


From doing research on the internet and talking with a fellow software developer, I have begun to explore creating the 3DIV project in Java3D. Java seems relatively well suited to a beginning programmer like me and has the flexibility of easily being deployed as a standalone software or embedded in a web page.


Stay tuned for more developments and please send me any suggestions/comments.