where in the world are users generating?

In my NISO presentation I made a rather imperfect metaphorical point, which is that there is too much darkness (in the sense of "too little access to information") on this map.  1 billion of us have incredible (and some would claim overwhelming, or "too much") information access, and 5 billion of us do not.

• Credit
  NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio - Earth at Night 2001
  http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=11793

Night illumination is of course a pretty weak proxy for "level of development".  One would hope actually that a truly developed society would not be wasting energy letting light leak up into the sky, and would instead have directed lighting with minimal sky glow.  But it gets the general point across.

I have argued in the past (in reference to Flickr and "peer production), that you could take the "Earth at Night" image and map it pretty closely to user-created content, on the theory that the main driving force behind user content is leisure time, and it's in the industrial, light-blaring nations that we have the most of this Internet time spent.

Dinah Sanders had an excellent counterpoint in her presentation, which was (something like) "where you don't see light, there are people using mobile phones".  Which is very valid, the idea of developmental leapfrogging, where countries and individuals are able to take advantage of new, less energy-intensive, advanced technologies to leap right into the next generation of Internet use.

However, I present as my counter-counterpoint, the Meebo Map, showing use of their IM tool (and with lots of caveats about dependencies on IP mapping tools, different tool use depending on language and location, and population densities)

http://blog.meebo.com/map