subject: The craziest idea on the Internet!? [print this page] Have you ever imagined what it will look like, if you could take a picture of a virtual world, such as Internet? Well, a website (www.stringxels.com) is doing exactly that: to create a picture of the whole Internet.
You may think, "This is nuts! It is impossible to take a picture of a virtual world! And even if it were possible, the Internet is huge! There is no way to fit the whole Internet in one single picture!" and you are right, it is nuts and is not gonna be easy, but maybe is not impossible... here is how they plan to do it.
The idea is not to print the whole content (text, images, links, etc.) of each website in a picture, but to create a big picture in which you can find and link every webpage of the Internet. Since there are millions of websites, each website will only have right to a small space in the picture. If each website of the Internet can be linked by a tiny banner, then it is possible to create a big mosaic of banners linking every Internet website.
However, as you should have already noticed, this is still not enough. Every website has tens, hundreds and sometimes thousands of webpages, hence they will need to include hundreds of millions of tiny banners in their Internet's picture. Even if the banners were insanely tiny (one pixel big), a picture with hundreds of millions of one-pixel banners will be so big and the banners so small that it has no sense to do it.
They didn't want to stop at this point, so they tried to find an answer to the next question: What do you do if a digital picture is too large and you want to see part of it in detail? Of-course... you zoom! Then, another problem raised: how can one zoom in that virtual world? And they found the right answer: keywords! Keywords are the perfect way to zoom in and zoom out of the Internet's picture. For each different keyword you will be zooming in a different side of the vast virtual world called Internet.
They stated that by doing so, they are basically adding a third dimension to their Internet's picture: width, height and Keywords. You can find the following analogy in their explanation; "The pixels of your screen will be hiding the third dimension in the same way that sub-atomic particles hide other dimensions in the String theory. Indeed, the pixels are strings of light that vibrate at different frequencies creating different colors. When you write a keyword you make the Stringxels vibrate to recreate the Internet's picture corresponding to that side of the virtual world."
To achieve their goal, they are asking everybody on the Internet to link their websites, blogs, profiles, articles, etc. with Stringxels to be part of the Internet's picture. The registration is free and the banner registration is free for small banners (larger banners may be registered for some few dollars).
