Every Man, Social Network Is An Island

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.