Geo-spatial visualizations can be immensely powerful. Consolidating data from several countries across the world and representing them in a single visualization with tools such as intensity or heat map can tell quite a story. It is not always necessary to fill the map with all available data points. The map can be powerful even with minimum representation. In that aspect, I found the ‘Real time Web monitor’ by Akamai very interesting.
Rather than showing the web traffic % in every country, the map only highlights countries with above normal network traffic. If one needs to dig deeper, the country-wise web traffic can be drilled down by expanding the plus/minus controls on the left. To make it simpler for users to locate a particular country, the countries are grouped by their respective continents. However, it must be noted that the web traffic for every region is calculated as a percentage of global network traffic while the above normal percentage figure is calculated based on region-wise normal network traffic. This does not stand out distinctly until you take a closer look at it.
I took a snapshot of the web monitor at 9.45 PM PST Friday 1/20/2017. The results were not surprising. Overall, the US web traffic was above normal, with California alone constituting about 3.9% of global traffic. In Asia, Japan topped the list followed by India and China. Underdeveloped countries in Africa had web traffic of only 0.1%. It would be interesting to see how the trend changes during weekdays.
Image source:
https://www.akamai.com/us/en/solutions/intelligent-platform/visualizing-akamai/real-time-web-monitor.jsp