Of course, we should never take the Internet for granted. We should also appreciate all the hard work that went into making the world an interconnected community with the Internet. A new map from TeleGeography and Telecom Egypt should help puts things into perspective as it lays out all the underwater Internet cables that are currently in existence on this earth. It’s awe-inspiring stuff. Here’s a few of the major underwater thoroughfares:

You can check out the full interactive map here. It contains a number of interesting stats that should make you really appreciate all the hard work that went into making sure you could communicate with people from all around the world. If you want to learn more about submarine communications cables, check out the Wikipedia article on the subject.

The wonderful folks at Reddit brought our attention to a “Map of the Internet” created by a team of Russians. Here’s the official description translated by a Redditor named weasel707:

Each site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by the number of visitors to the site: more hits means a larger circle. Transitions of users between sites creates “connections”: the stronger the connection, the more sites “want” to be close to each other on the map.

The Internet Map is a snapshot of the global network in its state at the end of 2011. It captures more than 350,000 sites from 196 countries. Information regarding over 2 million connections between sites unites them into thematic clusters. As expected, the largest clusters are formed from national sites, i.e. sites belonging to one particular country. For convenience, sites corresponding to a given country are shown in the same colour. For example, the red area is Russia, Yellow is Chinese, Violet is Japan, the large light-blue central area is American, and so on.

It’s important to note that clusters have a semantic relationship, i.e. they are united or grouped by their content. For example, one can see an extensive cluster of porno-sites between Japan and Brazil, as well as many small clusters uniting sites of one industry or field.

It’s utterly fascinating to see the Internet presented in this way. It’s also a good look at how big sites are and how closely related they are to one another. As you might expect, Google is the biggest star in the Internet universe with Facebook, Yahoo and YouTube coming up closely behind it. They make up the center of this universe with everything else revolving around it.

Of course, Reddit set out first to find themselves. As it turns out, Reddit is closest to Twitter with other sites like Cracked, Imgur, Buzzfeed and Tumblr all within its reach.

What about our own WebProNews? We’re floating around Bing at the moment for reasons that currently elude us at the office.

Even if you don’t want to admit it, you’re probably also curious about porn sites. As it turns out, YouPorn and xvideos were battling it for porn site supremacy at the end of 2011.

Another point of interest is MegaUpload. This map was thankfully made before the site was taken down by the feds so we can see how it stacks up to those around it. As it turned out, all of MegaUpload’s sites were interconnected with MegaUpload proper being the biggest.

I could spend hours looking at this map and I’m sure you could too. Check it out and start searching for your favorite sites. As far as I’m aware of, it’s been able to find every Web site that was in existence at the end of 2011. There is a lot to the Internet and tools like this are invaluable resources in teaching us how it works.

Looking pretty hefty already for a project being 10% completed.

The project will be taking advantage of the Minecraft 1.2 update, which allows structures to increase their height even further. According to the project directors, this will allow them to make an even more impressive Eyrie (pictured below).

For those familiar with the Game of Thrones show, the Eyrie was featured in the first season.

They hope to have the project completed within the next few months. I will be tracking the page, so if any significant updates are made, you can find them here.

One interesting tool they created in response to the disaster is an image gallery which shows how status updates spread in the hours and days following the earthquake and tsunami. The black dots show the high influx of updates.

These are three images from the set of ten. It’s interesting to see how the flow of Facebook took place in a span of 24 hours. Highly concentrated updates occurred earlier on the west coast, and within 12 hours the east coast became enveloped with Japan related updates.

Facebook has released this tool as a part of their effort to heighten awareness, and increase donations towards the disaster effort. They’ve partnered with Zynga, famed Facebook game developer, to take donations for ‘Save the Children’s Japan Earthquake/Tsunami Emergency Fund‘. If you’re an avid CityVille, Frontierville, or Farmville player, funds from virtual goods purchased in the series of games will go towards the joint Zynga/Facebook effort.

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At the Google Code Blog, Fox details the problem of planning a trip and unsuccessfully searching for upcoming conferences. She says that though Google’s Developer Events Calendar has been around for a while, it only listed events Google sponsored or attended.

The new calendar allows others to post upcoming events – conferences, user groups, or parties – for the developer community. It can be viewed in calendar or map views.

A few have already added their events, like the "Jurisdictionary club" in Oklahoma City, the Bossa Conference in Brazil, and JavaOne in San Francisco. 
 

The Multimap acquisition will complement Microsoft’s other mapping services, including Virtual Earth and Windows Live services. It will also boost Microsoft’s potential to be a key online mapping provider, as it looks to better compete with both Google and Yahoo.

Data from Nielsen Online shows Google Maps has a 21 percent reach among the globes users, compared to 1 percent for Multimap. Google maps had an estimated 71. 5 million unique visitors in October and Google Earth had 22.7 million unique visitors.

Microsoft’s Windows Live Maps had 7.1 million unique visitors globally during October. Multimap had 1.4 million users in October, trailing competitors MapQuest, ViaMichelin, Mappy and Map24.

"This acquisition will play a significant role in the future growth of our search business and presents a huge opportunity to expand our platform business beyond the UK and globally," said Sharon Baylay, the general manager of Microsoft’s online services group.

Microsoft said their was future potential to intergrate Multimap on it products and platforms.

"Partnering with Microsoft gives us a world of new opportunities to build our mapping services into new technologies and applications," said Jeff Kelisky, the chief executive of Multimap.

Mulitmap will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, as part of the Virtual Earth and Search teams in the Online Services Group. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

 The Satellite tab in the meantime received a checkbox which allows you to toggle off the display of labels on the map.

Anders, who discovered this change and shared it in the forum, notes that the new Terrain view “is mostly interesting to those of us who love geospatial data. The elevation looks like shadows.”

Anders notes another amendment to Google Maps, saying “search for a location and in the pop-up bubble, a Street View still image appears if there is Street View available for that location.” To reproduce this, you can search for e.g. N North Park Ave, Chicago, IL. Google Maps Street View allows you to view (pan and zoomable) panoramic photos of a limited number of US cities.

I can see this change live for other country’s Google Maps versions as well, like German maps.google.de, though as is often the case the map tiles don’t load properly here. Google Maps China on the other hand doesn’t have any satellite or terrain view, likely due to Google following censorship instructions from Chinese authorities.

[Thanks Anders!]

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Tag:

• view:timeline – displays a graph indicating the number of results by date so you can track trends, e.g., coldfusion view:timeline
• view:map – displays a map highlighting top search results, e.g., sean corfield view:map
• view:info – displays additional ways to highlight parts of the results based on dates, measurements, locations and images, e.g., sean corfield view:info (then select "Locations")

In addition, from the experimental page you can choose keyboard shortcuts (to navigate your search results) or left-hand / right-hand search menus (they’re slightly different).

You can choose to "join" one of the experiments which makes it your default Google results format (assuming you’re logged in). I picked the left-hand context menus which seem to be richer.

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Actually, a map of the area shows that about four miles should separate the two corporations.  Which begs the question: would a nearby state park or an adjacent country club make the better battleground?

Okay, okay.  In all seriousness, it appears that Yahoo made a very intelligent move.  “The lease includes the right to put a big Yahoo sign on the building, overlooking Interstate 405,” notes Todd Bishop, who broke the story.  Also, “[a]mong other things, the new office could put it in a better position to recruit Microsoft employees.”

Yahoo’s been losing employees left and right as of late, so that second point could be especially important.  But Bishop states that around 500 people will be able to inhabit the new offices, and since there are currently less than ten Bellevue-specific Yahoo job listings, we may have to just see what happens in that respect.

In a broader sense, any sort of expansion looks good for Yahoo.  With the company so often coming in second or third behind its competitors, this shows it can still make bold moves.