Projects: Watching the Namespace

Update: 06/04/00 - I'll update this document with more specific commentary, source code, and a lengthy rant on the horrific state of the domain name system and whois service in the 21st century when I get a chance, but for now suffice it to say that I've run the two-letters again, this time including the digits 0-9 in addition to the alphabeticals, and capturing the registration date for each domain. Below is the 2-d namespace as an animated GIF, presented by year. There is also a version presented by month (831K).

00		z0

0z		zz

A few notes:

28.com and 69.org are registered, but their data in their registry's respective whois servers is either inaccessible or inaccurate.
many register.com domains are listed as having been registered on either 5/13/97 or 5/20/97; hard to say whether this is coincidence or a characteristic of their database.
similarly, many dotster.com domains are listed as having been registered on 03/13/00.
the data gathering run was undertaken between 05/21/00 and 06/03/00. I had to stop for a week because NSI screwed up the whois db and I was getting nothing but freshness errors for the domains I was looking at.
because of the wide variance between the results formats of the various whois servers, I had to do approximately 10% of the lookups by hand.
props to geektools.com - thanks for the use of your excellent proxy.

the old, static versions (circa July 1998).

Other sites of interest to those intrigued by information mapping, particularly of the Internet and the domain namespace: