Google search volume by language (WebGL)

Hmm, I like this somewhat, but I'm not that sure it's an improvement from an information perspective. It seems that the main win of a 3d version over a map is that two axes of information can be displayed: color of the dot, and how far it projects up from the surface. But I have trouble interpreting the heights in any meaningful way; they seem mostly like noise, and in reality what I'm looking at to get an idea of editing activity is the density of the dots in various regions, not the height of the individual spikes--- exactly what I'd do on the 2d version of the map.

It does strictly provide more information, because there are two kinds of density displayed: how many spikes/dots are in a region, and how high each individual one is. But this two-factor density visualization seems more confusing than helpful; I think I'd rather have a single smoothed density estimate. Then maybe that could be displayed as height in a more terrain-type way?

I really like this, not because it's an excellent quantitative presentation of the data, but because the 3D makes it really easy to visualize distances and scales.

Some interesting things to note: - Amazingly, given the long history there, Europe has very clean borders and language divisions. This is obviously clear on the ground, too, but it's one of the things that continually surprises me about history. Compare China, which started off in a similar place over a relatively similar time scale.

- English Africa seems to have much higher internet penetration than other areas in Africa. Is this a colonial effect, or is it because African people tend to use the internet in English?

- There are some spikes here in unexpected places, like Reunion/Mauritius. Turkey is also more active than I would expect, and India less so.

Interesting - around Idaho there is a orange spike. Wonder where and what exactly that is.

I understand why there would be so much English search traffic in New York. But what's going on with Florida?

Doesn't show up for me in FF 3.6. Maybe you have to have Chrome.

Anyone else getting an error about too many redirects?

Sadly some parts of the World are almost dark.

Germany is blacked out.