Continuing from the two fascinating web visualizations that I wrote about last week (World Web Trends Map & Periodic Table of the Internet), here’s another one for you to chew. It’s called the World Web Map 2007 and it is based on the websites’ world classification carried out by Alexa and ComScore. The websites traffic is correlated with the “surface of the countries”. But delve into it, and the visualisation is not as intuitive as one would like it to be. In fact, it leaves me a little confused so as to its methodology.

Check out the original web link; here is the pdf version and this is the jpeg version

Thanks Robert, for the tip.

If you thought Goa was only about the hedonism of sun & sand, this is going to surprise you. Zakly is a mobile application from a Goa based startup (called Dogears). It works as a small microsite, a visiting card or contact info, that can be accessed from any mobile device. You have to register on the Zakly website and fill out your profile (name, address, URL, basic info etc). Next time somebody asks you for a visiting card, give them your Zakly username. They can access http://zakly.info on their mobiles, enter your username and go through your profile/info. The application can be used by users as their mobile visiting card, by companies as their mobile microsite or for providing a place on the mobile web for disseminating simple information. Its creators wanted to create a low bandwidth, no frills contact manager with low entry barriers, that will spread through the viral effect. Their thinking was influenced by how people remember each other’s emails addresses- and decided that something similar might work for the mobile space in this manner. The service is meant to be free and they plan to make money through internet advertising – both web & mobile based.

I like the idea for its simplicity and because it serves a purpose. Four times out of ten, when somebody asks me for my visiting card, I don’t have it; in such cases something like Zakly makes sense. Even otherwise, I think traditional (paper) visiting cards are slowly losing some of their relevance. The information in the card gets outdated quickly as people changes jobs, mobile phones, residences so frequently these days. On many occasions, instead of looking up visiting cards, I prefer looking up somebody’s blog or online profile for finding the latest contact info- email, phone numbers etc. Zakly in that sense is a step in the direction of creating a universally accessible, always updated, centralised repository of your digital identity. And that seems to general trend these days- think of Open IDs, single sing-ons etc.