Info 202 Fall 2011

In the wildest of my dreams could I have imagined the data present on Internet represented onto a map. This is exactly what the 'Internet Archive team' have done. But the scope of the data is limited to Geocities. 

Before the dot-com bubble Geocities seemed to be the best place to add a personal touch to the Internet by creating your own websites. As many as 35 million people had their personal ideas bundled into a package on the Internet. But it seemed to dawn away with respect to time, especially because of the emerging social media sites like Facebook. Eventually, Yahoo! decided to pull down the shutters on Geocities.

On the first anniversary since its shut down, The Internet Archive team created a map called the Deleted City and organized all the information on this map. The map was a scrollable with each region representing a theme. And the region appears more prominent when the content associated with that theme is more. Also each region was given a thematic representation like all celebrity oriented sites were grouped in the region "Hollywood". The map is scrollable and on zooming into the region, it gives the sites associated with that region. A further zoom, woul eventually reveal the data from the individual sites.

The entire deleted data was compiled into a 641Gb file.

All in all, I found this method of organizing data onto a map very interesting. Though, this concept seems similar to Tag clouds. But it has a further more deep meaning to it. Its like a world in which we lived. A world whose map consisted of sites clubbed to form a city/region whose boundaries were not predefined. I could relate this to the X-men example wherein Professor Charles Xavier compiled a list of all mutant across the world.