The Geography of Top Level Domain Names

Some of the sheep team have just published a new map over at the Information Geographies project. This one draws on some of Matt's long term research into the geography of domain names which dates back more than fifteen years.[1]   Egads, where did the time go?.

The map offers a detailed overview of one-facet of the geography of content production.  While not the normal kind of user generated data we use in our work at FloatingSheep, domain name registrations are an indicator of content production.

Some results are unsurprising (for instance the low scores in many countries that have low numbers of internet users). However, other unexpected patterns also reveal themselves (such as the relatively low numbers of domains in many Asian countries).  For a more detailed description of results take a look at the discussion on the map's Internet Geography home.

Also, to give some perspective on how much things have changed, here is map of .com domains in San Francisco (and zoomed into just the South of Market region) back in 1998 when there were less than 2 million rather than 110 million that exist today.

Distribution of .com domains by Registrant Address, San Francisco, Summer 1998

Source: Matthew Zook, 2005 (see below)

Distribution of .com domains by Registrant Address, 
South of Market, San Francisco, Summer 1998
(apologies for the low quality image, it is the only one available)

Source: Matthew Zook, (see below)

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[1] If you are interested in reading more domain name work check out.

Zook, M.A. (2005). The Geography of the Internet Industry: Venture Capital, Dot-coms and Local Knowledge. Blackwell Publishers.

Zook, M.A. (2001). Old hierarchies or new networks of centrality? The global geography of the internet content market. American Behavioral Scientist. (June). Vol 44. No. 10. 1679-1696.

Zook, M.A. (2000). The web of production: The economic geography of commercial internet content production in the United States. Environment and Planning A. Vol. 32. 411-426.  

Mapping Crime in the City by the Bay

Although we're a bit late to the game again, we thought we'd go ahead and do another comparison between some of our cyberscape visualizations and some other great maps floating (like sheep?) around on the interwebs. The following visualizations from Doug McCune use publicly available data from the City of San Francisco to map the incidence of various crimes around the city.

Actual Crime as Elevation in San Francisco

As one can see (and as Doug points out in his original blog post), the geography of crime in San Francisco is not only unevenly distributed in space, but also in terms of what crimes are being committed in different places. And while our visualization below shows only general references to "crime" in the Google Maps database, it demonstrates that the locations of virtual references to crime are actually highly correlated with the places that actual crimes occur.

Google Maps References to "Crime" in San Francisco

It's also interesting to note that the data for our map was collected in January 2009, while the city data used for the elevation maps covers all of the 2009 calender year. To see more of Doug's San Fransicso crime visualizations, you can see his original post here: If San Francisco Crime were Elevation.

The Geotaggers' World Atlas (and cyberscapes, too!)

Having just stumbled across another amazing visualization of geotagged photographs, we figured we'd go ahead and share more of the stuff we've been looking at these days. The following map comes from Eric Fischer's The Geotaggers' World Atlas on Flickr, which, you guessed it, maps geotagged Flickr photos. What's so unique about Fischer's series of maps is that he focuses on how fast the photographer was moving when they took the picture by comparing time and date stamps on geotagged photos.

Geotagged Flickr Photos in San Francisco by Eric Fischer

In his maps, black lines indicate walking speed (less than 7mph), while red lines approximate bicycling speed (less than 19mph), blue is for motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph) and green indicates freeways or rapid transit. Based on the repetitive tracing, it's possible to see the places within each city that have been photographed and geotagged most frequently. So how might these concentrations of geotagged Flickr photos compare to our maps of urban cyberscapes around the world?

All User-Generated Google Maps Content in San Francisco

Although the purpose and scale of these two visualizations are different, they both show a roughly similar concentration of user-generated content (in either Flickr or Google Maps) around Market Street in San Francisco. Since Fischer did this exercise for 50 different cities around the world, some of which we've already mapped using our own method, the comparisons between the two can go on and on.

Let us know if you find anything else interesting!