It's the $64,000 question behind social networking: do proliferating online "communities" bring the world together or isolate us all behind computer screens in cold, dark, lonely bedrooms? A 2010 map of the New World Order established by Web 2.0 makes a convincing case for...both.

The Map of Online Communities comes courtesy of xkcd, "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." After sifting through traffic figures for a mind-boggling array of interactive websites, xkcd dusted off his 5th grade geography skills to draw up a map in which a website's popularity corresponds to its geographic area.

Frankly, there's too much going on here for me to condense into a blog post. That has nothing to do with the fact that blogs are relegated to what looks like a splintered, post-9.9 earthquake Australia. Just see for yourself and check out a large print version here.

A few instant takeaways:

• Monolithic Facebook is scarier than the Soviet Union ever was
• What is Happy Farm?
• Poor, poor Friendster. I guess there are some perks to being the Online Community equivalent of Guam.
• Ugh, Michelle Malkin.
• I heard the Forum Archipelago is really nice no time of year.
• Cruise Critic gets its own country?
• The Bay of Flame and Troll are way too small.
• This map makes me happy to see that Spoken Language is to The Internet and Cell Phones as Canada is to Luxembourg.