InterWebMetroMapThing

[gothwalk]

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a truly magnificent map of the internet made and posted by Information Architects in Japan. The people who like the modified Tube maps should go look at this.

It fascinates me, though, that they’re actually using the thing:

In house, we use it as a consulting tool. It has helped us exploring, defining and explaining the Internet strategy and positioning of all of our clients since we first introduced it in January. Each website on the map stands as a (more or less) successful paradigm for an interactive brand, design or business model. In order to position yourself, you need to know your place on this map.

That’s a very cool way to approach the idea of positioning.

Comments

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I would have expected it to be much bigger. I can't seem to find the 'Latest Posts'/number of users bit that used to be on the homepage, but isn't it something like thirteen million users? Perhaps that's not much in the grand scheme of things.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

LJ takes effort, y'see. Facebook, MySpace, et and cetera, are very point, click, done kinda things, with no more actual user input than a text message. Because LJ takes that effort to update, it gets fewer people and less attention. alexa.com shows it as having only 20% of the reach of MySpace, and considerably fewer pageviews.

That said, that map is from people in Tokyo, and almost certainly reflects their impressions of the internet, rather than real user numbers. From that point of view, a map from Ireland would have a HUGE bebo.com and a sizable paddypower.com, and in Russia, LJ would loom a lot larger. In Korea, battleNet probably dwarfs everything else...