Another piece of data visualisation brilliance has appeared on The Guardian’s Data blog this week; The Internet Map.

The map pretty much does what it says on the tin. It’s a map of the world’s websites, with different sized and coloured circles representing the largest sites in terms of traffic and ‘levels of activity’. The bigger the circle, the more traffic and attention the site is getting.

The different colours represent different countries, the UK is a rather pleasing light blue. Circles are also positioned in relation to other sites that are visited by the same users. For example, you’ll notice visitors to telegraph.co.uk also hit up guardian.co.uk, independent.co.uk and timesonline.co.uk quite often.

It’s also interesting to see which sites are close to each other. Sites like Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook are surrounded by many others, as one might expect. This gives some good insight into a media outlet’s links to social media – look how close The Next Web appears to Twitter’s huge sphere.

The map has been developed by Ruslan Enikeev, a data-visualisation designer. The appeal of the map is so great Ruslan is appealing for donations to cover the cost of hosting it. You can donate, if you’d like to, direct from the site.

@simonhill