Online Communities
Online Communities
[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.] Map of Online Communities and related points of interest Geographic area represents estimated size of membership
[Land Area Labels:] The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live), AOL, Chat Rooms Reunion dot com, Classmates dot com, E-harmony, Friendster, Faceparty, Chasm, Qwghlm, Yahoo Games, Mountains of Web 1.0, The Lonely Island, MySpace, Attractive MySpace Pages, The Series of Tubes, Myspace Bands, WOW, Lineage, Second Life, Third Life, UO, EQ, FFXI, 2channel, 4chan, LJ, Xanga, Orkut, Cyworld, Blurty, OK Cupid, Facebook, Piczo, The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island, Practicals (Noob) Focus on Real Life (IRL) Focus on Web (.com) Intellectuals (π) Broadcaster, The Bit Torrent, Flickr, Last.fm, DeviantArt, Isle of Slash, Numa, Digg, Fark, Reddit, Something Awful, Your Base, Soviet Russia, /. [Slashdot], Spaaarta (YTMND), StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, The Blogipelago, Sulawesi, Xu Jinglei, Post Secret, Technocrati, [Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ] BoingBoing, Huffington Post, Gays of Web 2.0, The Wikipedia project, MIT, Engadget, Gizmodo, Usenet, MAKE Blog, IRC Isles, Sourceforge.
[Sea Area Labels:] NOOB Sea, Gulf of YouTube, Bay of Angst, Sea of Culture, Ocean of Subculture, P2P Shoals, Straits of Web 2.0, Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons, Bay of Trolls, Viral Straits, Sea of Memes, The Wet Sea Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress
(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.) Spring 2007

Note: This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet has changed a lot since that time.
This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at 802: Online Communities 2 . As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the Compass-Rose-Shaped Island points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears a slight resemblance to South East Asia .
Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of Memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0."
This is a joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organize the illustration. A Compass Rose —the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map— appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose.
The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organize the map. Left is "Focus on Real Life," labelled "IRL," an abbreviation for "In Real Life." Right is "Focus on Web," labelled ".com." Up is "Practicals," labelled "N," as in "North," but with small letters making it spell "Noob," slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" — a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals," labelled "π," an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14159265358979323846264338.
These are communities that were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them — Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
These are sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was Friendster , but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:
This is a portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.
Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content.
Straits of Web 2.0 : A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. Gays of Web 2.0 is a pun: The opposite of a gay person (homosexual) is a straight person (heterosexual).
Sites such as Wikipedia and chat programs such as IRC.
Need descriptions
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures." Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral," i.e. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.
Sites
Memes and related
An area dedicated to MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games, or again, how dragons, especilally anthropomorphic dragons, are very-very popular in the furry community.
[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.] Map of Online Communities and related points of interest Geographic area represents estimated size of membership
[Land Area Labels:] The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live), AOL, Chat Rooms Reunion dot com, Classmates dot com, E-harmony, Friendster, Faceparty, Chasm, Qwghlm, Yahoo Games, Mountains of Web 1.0, The Lonely Island, MySpace, Attractive MySpace Pages, The Series of Tubes, Myspace Bands, WOW, Lineage, Second Life, Third Life, UO, EQ, FFXI, 2channel, 4chan, LJ, Xanga, Orkut, Cyworld, Blurty, OK Cupid, Facebook, Piczo, The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island, Practicals (Noob) Focus on Real Life (IRL) Focus on Web (.com) Intellectuals (π) Broadcaster, The Bit Torrent, Flickr, Last.fm, DeviantArt, Isle of Slash, Numa, Digg, Fark, Reddit, Something Awful, Your Base, Soviet Russia, /. [Slashdot], Spaaarta (YTMND), StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, The Blogipelago, Sulawesi, Xu Jinglei, Post Secret, Technocrati, [Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ] BoingBoing, Huffington Post, Gays of Web 2.0, The Wikipedia project, MIT, Engadget, Gizmodo, Usenet, MAKE Blog, IRC Isles, Sourceforge.
[Sea Area Labels:] NOOB Sea, Gulf of YouTube, Bay of Angst, Sea of Culture, Ocean of Subculture, P2P Shoals, Straits of Web 2.0, Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons, Bay of Trolls, Viral Straits, Sea of Memes, The Wet Sea Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress
(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.) Spring 2007
