What the World Would Look Like if Countries Were as Big as Online Populations | Hacker News Reader

What the World Would Look Like if Countries Were as Big as Online Populations

theatlantic.com

35 pointsddeck17 comments

So Antarctica has the biggest online population?

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/population.png

you should read about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_cylindrical_projection

Whenever I see warped maps like this, I intuitively compare it to the standard map. Which, if you think about it, is a ridiculous comparison since one is based on population and the other is based on land mass.

In India there is huge potential , with mobile penetration increasing exponentially, its a big market waiting.

South America is basically the same.

Wow, Canada is really tiny inspite of being huge geographically. And I don't see Africa at all. Powerful visualization.

> And I don't see Africa at all

That would be because Africa isn't a country. Look in the bottom center of the visualization: MAR, NGA, EGY, ZAF and a number of smaller countries between them - that's Africa.

Yeah, Canada is only 34 mln population! I was really shocked when I learnt that recently.

Fun fact: over 80% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border.

Sweden is the same as Canada, highly connected but large unpopulated areas

why is alaska so large? The entire state population is only 780k.. so even if it were 100%, it should only be about two dots

Edit: also it says this data was published by the world bank in 2011

Data isn't shown for every subunit of every country, the whole US have been sized according to their internet population, not each state.

What I find missing is mostly Taiwan, which should be the size and colour of Australia between Philippines and Korea on this map.

Perhaps they bundled it in with China? A political minefield there, of course...

Sure, that might be why they avoided it.

Since I still think it's an interesting to have it for comparison, I added it along with Hong Kong, taking my data from Wikipedia (respectively 17 and 5 million users, and 76% and 72% penetration):

http://ssz.fr/brdl/internet-pop-hk-tw.png (I'm no graphic artist and just fiddled a bit with Gimp to get something that looks acceptable - obviously the whole map would need to be redrawn to better take geography into account).

The two places do make up a sizable part of Internet population in east Asia, and make it look less like a region with only two isolated developped countries.

Yes. The data source for the map is the World Bank. The World Bank does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation and refers to them as Chinese Taipei, as does the IMF.

Alaska isn't a country.

Japan is big.

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