Following up the xkcd.com "comic", a sweet idea to map the IP address range and their owners into a 2d map (where all adjacent values are grouped together), some bored people over at an email consulting company mapped out the IP addresses and activities using actual CAIDA 'whois' data in a scalable google map. CAIDA (The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) collected the data as seen in the huge png:

Huge CAIDA PNG

The scalable 'google maps' like viewing of the Hilbert Table is here:

http://thewholeinternet.wordtothewise.com/

I should be all Blog2.0 and post this as a trackback, but they don't have the option.

It is pretty neat to take data that you normally don't visualize, in this case the assigned DNS IP ranges of organizations and put them together in a way that can make the lay-person understand something new. In this case, you can see the companies that 'formed', or at least were the first to embrace, the internet and register whole top level domains! Meaning, of the 4-256 values in a typical IPv4 these companies have a whole first number to themselves.

For example, The Computer Science Corporation 'CSC' owns the whole 20.*.*.* address range. Crazy.

Labels: internets, tech