Jeff Heard was tasked with creating some beautiful supporting graphics for the director of iBiblio to include in a keynote speech at code4lib based on iBiblio’s approximately 8TB of weblogs accumulated since the beginning of the project. His creation is this interesting “sphere” design showing source traffic.
I broke all these addresses up into subnets and assigned a unique position in a sphere to each subnet. Longitude is the first octet, mapped from 0,255 to (-180,180) Latitude is the second octet, mapped from 0,255 to (-90,90), and the radius out from the center is the third octet. The subnets are visualized by a PovRay blob component or a sphere in the case of more than 10% of active internet subnets have hit the site. The radius of the sphere or the strength of the static field behind the blob is the number of IP addresses within the subnet that have touched the site.
The culmination of his work can be seen on his site, a massive 6kx3.5k poster at 300dpi. Rendered via POVRay, it’s interesting to look at.
