The BBC has taken the top 100 sites, as determined by the Nielsen company, and graphed them into a treemap. This interactive infographic allows you to look at five different categories of the data: search sites, social sites, retail, news sites, and allows you to group them by country. The BBC explains how the data was gathered, how it was visualized, and even allows you to download the data yourself so that you can experiment with it by doing your own visualizations. From the accompanying article:
The data used to generate the interactive treemap visualisation was collected by the Nielsen company and covers the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, US and Australia. The figures represent unique users for the month of January 2010.
The categories – such as retail, social networks, search/portal – were defined by the BBC. Because some websites have more than one use, they could fall within more than one category (e.g. Yahoo). However, the treemap only classifies them once.
The maps were produced using the Prefuse Flare software, developed by the University of California Berkeley.
