A while ago I saw this beautiful map of country codes of the world:

There is however a big flaw in this map: it aims to be a map about the internet but the country codes (cctld) are scaled by population (offline) size.
Esther Weltevrede and I redid this map by querying Google for that cctld (for each cctld we did the following query: “site:.cctld” and noted the number of results returned). We then scaled the cctlds accordingly, thus answering the question “What is the size of countries’ assigned domains on the World’s Web, as Google.com estimates it has indexed?”:

Esther has embedded this in her research as part of the DMI course ‘the Webs’.

Have you ever seen a web page unworthy of the Internet? Join the Delete from Internet movement and nominate pages for speedy removal. Help clean up the Web, one irritating flash site at a time.

Made by Esther Weltevrede, Michael Stevenson, and Erik Borra as a birthday present for our designer friend who really wanted to trash some websites. Some have called it “the sort of dangerous idea that net terrorists could misuse.” I can only ROTFL with that kind of comments.

I just got a tikitag RFID reader. Tikitag will sell their betas starting from October the 1st. What they try to do is quite simple: provide everyone with an RFID reader and some tags, have the user install some software, and let him/her couple the unique RFID number to a service (e.g. open a browser with a specific url) through their site. As the tikitag reader software always connects to the tikitag website, I assume they hope to become the central point on the web linking RFID to information or ‘actions’.

Of course I don’t like third party platforms storing and tracking my information so I started scripting. I made a simple cube with an RFID tag on each side linked to the opening of a web browser with the sites I check in the morning - thus skipping the need to connect to tikitag.com to do local stuff.

If you want to try it out get your hands on a RFID reader (tikitag or not) and follow the instructions on Mediamatic’s page for interfacing with RFID. After that it is really simple to write a script to parse out the tag id and link it to an action yourself.