Thursday, June 21, 2007

internet mileage metering - how to measure?

how would you measure how "far" you have gone in the Internet?

Obviously one could just log URLs visited (most browsers do), but some urls are nearer to each other than others (small world etc).

At the IP level, one can run traceroutes and see how many IP networks (prefixes) and how many ASs (ISPs) one has visited or traversed (again, some ISPs are next to each other - some nets are "within" other nets, so it makes for a fun challenge - the AS level graph is well known to have an (approximately) power law node degree).

Why would you want to do this? Because that's what we do in the Internet: mostly harmless, mostly useless stuff:-)

So another metric might be (sort of like googlewhacking) - how many places do you go that very few others do (whether IP addrs, ports, or URLs)? That might then act as a "weirdness" or "geekiness" metric. On the other hand, it might just be sad:)
Like only going to the field of Lost Vagueness in Glastonbury and never standing neck-deep in mud by the Pyramid Stage grooving to the Arctics...

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misery me, there is a floccipaucinihilipilification (*) of chronsynclastic infundibuli in these parts and I must therefore refer you to frank zappa instead, and go home