Map of the Internet 1.0: Explore this beautiful, hand-drawn map of the online world

How do you map something like the internet? It’s a challenge that continues to fascinate many virtual-cartographers, and amateur graphic designer Martin Vargic is the latest to try his hand - creating the magnificently baroque image above. Vargic began the project in December 2013, using old National Geographic maps for visual inspiration and Alexa data of the most visited websites in the world to scale the different land masses. Perhaps the amazing fact is that the map was drawn free hand, directly into Photoshop. "My map is divided into two distinct parts,” Vargic explained to The Independent. “The eastern continent, the Old World, showcases software companies, gaming companies and some of the more real-life oriented websites." "The western part, the New World, is composed from two major continents; the northern one showcasing social networks, search websites, video websites, blogs, forums and art websites. All major adult-oriented websites, in addition to various warez and torrent sites, are located on the south-western continent." The main landmass on the left is populated bysoftware companies - with Google and Facebook dominating. Popular online games including World of Warcraft and League of Legends can be seen in the bottom left, just by the Procrastination Sea. Older hardware companies make up most of the landmass on the right of the map. The border between Microsoft and Apple seems pretty impassable though, with Incompatability Mountains keeping the pair firmly separate. In the bottom left of the map lies the reminder that a large portion of the internt is pornography with various sites located on the Plains of Lust. Joined on to this is the nation of Internet Crime, with various torrent sites trailing out into the ocean. Look out for Isohunt and Megaupload - two websites shut down by the authorities and labelled 'Destroyed by the Capitol'. In the center of the map is 'The Capitol', a small island but home to the CIA, FBI, and NSA. Though it looks like someone took a bite out of it - that's the Snowden Gulf. The most popular web browsers crowd around this central point. To the south is the Land of Forgotten Websites where once-great URLs now form part of the static and frozen ice sehfl. Wikipedia gets its own island, just north of the Ocean of Information, and catching the News Datastream blowing off the media outlets just out of frame to the right. Aol, CNN and the BBC make up the majority of the news sites, with the isolated Daily Mail island just to the left. Above all these we can see the Gossip Data Stream flowing from various messenger clients. A closer look at the right-hand land mass, showing various antivirus companies, with The Firewall ocean current keeping away the Scareware and Adware torrents. Above the antivirus companies lies Nintendo, Sony and the Gulf of Gamers, catching the flow from the Multiplayer Datastream. Microsoft's little outcrop includes the likes of Halo and Age of Empires. Vargic began the map by looking at the most visited sites on the internet. Four mini maps in the two bottom corners show a bit more information about the internet, with this particular example showing the extent of NSA surveillance worldwide. The other mini maps show the most used browsers, social networks and internet penetration by company. Vargic says he was inspired by an earlier map of the internet created by Randal Munroe, the programmer behind the well-known xkcd web-comic. Comparing Munroe and Vargic’s images highlights the difficulty with mapping something as complex as the web. While Vargic begun his map in terms of traffic, platforms and services, Munroe’s approach uses online communities as the main constituent. Both individuals have made the point that it isn’t the physical world that defines the web – but something less tangible, be it people or software. You can map the internet using its infrastructure as a starting point (one anonymous hacker did just this in 2013, compromising more than 420,000 computers to achieve the feat), but although maps of pure data are beautiful, they sometimes seem to be more about spectacle, than communication. Any map of the internet will be as much a work of fiction as it is a ‘real’ representation of the web, but Vargic’s has the advantage of being both informative and engaging. He also says he'll be updating it in the future with more languages and those looking to support the project can buy a copy of the map for themselves. In this way Vargic's map and others like it are similar to the rough charts of terra incognita made by early explorers: they're works in progress as well as a draw for the imagination, and the more we find about the territory under scrutiny, the more maps we'll make.