Babbling about data quality, real world alignment and maps is a regular topic on this blog and this Saturday is no exception.
This week I stumbled on a discussion in the “Data, Data, Data” community on Google Plus. There was a map:
The map visualizes how the world would look like if every internet user had an equal amount of space to live on. This turns the land masses on the earth to have a different shape than in reality given:
- Population density
- Internet penetration
As internet penetration is the main purpose of the map the penetration percentage for the different countries are highlighted by color in order to be fit for the purpose of use and thus showing highest penetration in Canada, Northern Europe, Qatar, South Korea and New Zealand.
Some countries seem to have disappeared from the planet as mentioned in the comments on Google Plus: Singapore, Taiwan (officially Republic of China) and North Korea (officially Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). The latter one has probably gone because of no data or no users. Well, probably both reasons.
On a side note it’s a bit peculiar that countries on the map are labeled by the ISO 3 character code and not the 2 character code that more resembles country domains on the internet.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 