I believe that in order to raise reader interest, one should start a post with something that stands out. Maybe a list or some other means of breaking up the monotony of the text; or make the text itself stand out by writing something quoteworthy in the beginning. The best way, however, is probably to post a picture or a video or something along those lines. So in order to comply with my own ideas, I’ll post the pic first and then explain it further down:

In the beginning there was light…the light from my monitor as I browsed various link pages one evening looking for something amusing. That’s when I found an excellent map of IP density in the world. The top 10 list isn’t that surprising: the US, Canada and so on. (Worth noting are the Nordic countries; we generally have very good Internet capacities up here in the cold north. Except for Norway which appears to be a bit backwards, IP-wise.) The bottom 10 countries aren’t very surprising either: African countries and Afghanistan. Tragic, but not surprising. If anything, I’m almost surprised that Congo – which is at the bottom – has even 1023 IPs.

There’s also a shaded map in that page that seems completely unintuitive to me. Red usually marks density, and given the title of the page (IP Assignment, Per Capita) it would indicate that the map shows IP density. But no – the scale marks the amount of people per IP instead. Still, a very cool map indeed.

And that brings me to a recent xkcd web comic which shows a map of IP address allocation. Very interesting to note is the massive amount of corporation IP blocks compared to – for example – Africa’s allocation block.

While on the topic of xkcd, I highly recommend everyone to check out this comic. The picture on top of this post is an example of what you might find there: very nerdy comics that often require knowledge in many various areas. Check out this and this for example. I love it! It’s funny and geeky and makes you feel like you Know Stuff(TM) that Others(TM) probably wouldn’t. Hubris is always fun, ne?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Awesome Stuff, Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.