Designer creates ‘Internet map’ with 3,000 sites of countries

When artist and amateur graphic designer Martin Vargic began to envision the Internet seven years ago, he didn’t see it as a series of 0s and 1s, or as giant servers that physically store every activity. our digital movement. Instead, Vargic envisions the Internet as a planet, which can be beautifully drawn like a map of the world.

He made this project for the first time in 2014 when he was a student in Slovakia. He was inspired by the comic-style “online community map” created by Randall Munroe in 2007 for the comics website xkcd, but Vargic used Photoshop to model his version in the original style. map seen in National Geographic. Vargic updated the original map in 2015, but thinks it’s time to continue upgrading the map in 2021.

” The landscape of the Internet has changed dramatically, and old maps are becoming increasingly outdated,” he told Insider .

After more than 1,000 hours of work, he created a map with much more detail – while previous maps were made from around 200 web pages, the 2021 version includes 3,000. On the map, each site is represented as a country, and they are grouped together based on their category, such as news outlets, social networks, e-commerce platforms, and tools. search.

The size of the country is calculated by Vargic based on the average visits of each website from January 2020 to January 2021, according to Alexa Rank, the Amazon-owned Alexa Internet measure of a page’s popularity. web, calculated by unique users and pageviews.

The center of the map depicts “the core and backbone of the internet as we know it” – this includes internet service providers, such as Orange, Xfinity and Verizon, which are then included, Vargic said. surrounded by web browsers. “Dark web” is depicted on the south side of the map.

Each site’s “country” is outlined in its primary brand color, with the founders and CEOs representing the capitals and an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 other “towns” and “cities” describing a Notable number of features and related services.

For example, Facebook land (by far the largest in the social media group) has “Valley of Friends”, “Cyberbullying Strip”, “Attention Seeking Channels” and “Duckface Mountains”. Right next door, in Instagram’s “country,” “Filter Hill” is surrounded by the Kardashian-Jenner clan, while on Reddit, Mod Mountains and Karma Hills are surrounded by some iconic subreddits and users Best.

“While creating the map, I had to do a lot of research on the content of these sites, their services, features, and the most common users, which is not easy with many different languages. ,” said Vargic.

The 2021 version of the map, in addition to having a lot of other web pages, contains different content than the version Vargic first created many years ago, as the landscape has changed and new platforms have launched. . Vargic says that as the internet grows, his maps will become obsolete, and estimates that by the end of the decade he will need to create a new one.

Ultimately, Vargic said he hopes his maps will give people a more intuitive understanding of the internet ecosystem.

You can view the high resolution map here.

By: Insider