(via), City Distance is a neat project by bestirario that aims at measuring informational distance between cities. What this means is simple: it creates a visual representation of the the world comparing real geographical distances with informational distances as defined by Google:

"This tridimensional scheme represents the strength of relations between cities from searches on google. The main idea is to compare the number of pages on internet [sic] where the two cities appear one close to the other, with the number of pages they appear isolated. This position indicates some kind of intensity of relation between the cities. After measuring this “google proximity” we divide it by its geographical distance. By this process we obtain an indicator about the strength of the relation in spite of the real distance, a kind of informational distance between cities."

Which is what the authors of this project calls the "google platonic distance between cities" (See the website for more information about how to compute this).

Why do I blog this? A very curious and insightful representation comes out from this sort of viz. I guess the granularity can be different and reveal finer-grained patterns at smaller levels. Yet another interesting type of urban visualization.