Since my capstone relies on computers on both ends, I decided to turn to another form of communication between people - telephones.
------------------------------
The Interphrase Project
The telephone. A device that lets you pick up and talk to someone across the country as if they were in the next room. Through a complicated series of wires, stations and junctions, people can talk to anyone that they please - provided the person picks up the phone, of course. People are no longer isolated by the delay of writing letters and waiting for a response, or limited to the only sort of emotions you can put on paper. Relationships can stay close between friends and family when you can talk to them as if it were face to face. But, how close are you to the people you know?
Interphrase is a new project that lets you track how many calls you receive from a particular person, and the duration of each. By dialing in and signing up for our service, we begin monitoring your phone usage, and a monthly diagram is sent right to your home. Set up in an easy-to-understand format, like planets in the sky, people you call most often and the longest will be prominently featured, while those who you only call once or twice will be more indistinct. By observing this diagram, we hope that you will get a clearer picture of how the telephone has affected the relationships with the people you know.
Call us toll-free at 1-800-IPP-HOME to sign up!
11.08.2007
11.06.2007
Notes: Universal Motion
Another important aspect to this game is making stuff move. So, in order to make it believable motion and satisfy my perfectionist urges, here's the notes I've taken on the relative motions of the Universe.
Motion
First, the relationship between the planet and it's moon. The moon orbits around the planet - clear enough. It is also "tidally locked" to a planet, which means the same face is always showing to the planet, with a few exceptions. This is also less the case the further a moon is away from the planet. Which means the moon spins on it's axis the opposite of what the Earth spins on, to keep the same face pointed towards the planet. This face is also the "heavier" side of the moon, which leaves interesting possibilities in our project as to the link between planets and moons.
Now, the motion of planets. The planets of the solar system work as follows:
Mercury:
~0.4x the size of Earth
orbits once every 88 days (47.87 km/s)
rotates once every 59 days (10.892 km/h)
Venus:
~0.9x the size of Earth
orbits once every 225 days (35.02 km/s)
rotates once every 243 days (6.52 km/h)
Mars:
~0.5x the size of the Earth
orbits once every 687 days (24.077 km/s)
rotates once every 24 hours and 40 minutes (868.22 km/h)
Jupiter:
~11x the size of Earth
orbits once every 4335 days (13.07 km/s)
rotates once every 10 hours (45,300 km/h)
Saturn:
~9x the size of Earth
orbits once every 10823 days (9.69 km/s)
rotates once every 10 hours and 32 minutes (35,500 km/h)
Uranus:
~4x the size of Earth
orbits once every 30799 days (6.81 km/s)
rotates once every 17 hours and 14 minutes (9,320 km/h)
Neptune:
~3.8x the size of Earth
orbits once every 60373 days (5.43 km/s)
rotates once every 16 hours and 6 minutes (9,660 km/h)
So, aside from the obvious conclusion that the further the planet is away from the Sun, the longer it takes to orbit, there are a few other observations. Planets tend to get bigger the further away they are from the Sun, although size seems to be mostly determined by their composition. And, planet rotate faster the further away they get from the Sun - due to lesser gravity or the size they achieve, I'm not sure.
Will this affect how we organize our websites? With the example of Slashdot being a Sun, could it mean that it's closest planet will end up the size of Jupiter? Or should we compress it down somehow, much like gravity compresses down planets, or would tampering with the fact that the size of a web page determines the size of the planets cripple the educational aspect somehow?
Source: Various Wikipedia articles.
Motion
First, the relationship between the planet and it's moon. The moon orbits around the planet - clear enough. It is also "tidally locked" to a planet, which means the same face is always showing to the planet, with a few exceptions. This is also less the case the further a moon is away from the planet. Which means the moon spins on it's axis the opposite of what the Earth spins on, to keep the same face pointed towards the planet. This face is also the "heavier" side of the moon, which leaves interesting possibilities in our project as to the link between planets and moons.
Now, the motion of planets. The planets of the solar system work as follows:
Mercury:
~0.4x the size of Earth
orbits once every 88 days (47.87 km/s)
rotates once every 59 days (10.892 km/h)
Venus:
~0.9x the size of Earth
orbits once every 225 days (35.02 km/s)
rotates once every 243 days (6.52 km/h)
Mars:
~0.5x the size of the Earth
orbits once every 687 days (24.077 km/s)
rotates once every 24 hours and 40 minutes (868.22 km/h)
Jupiter:
~11x the size of Earth
orbits once every 4335 days (13.07 km/s)
rotates once every 10 hours (45,300 km/h)
Saturn:
~9x the size of Earth
orbits once every 10823 days (9.69 km/s)
rotates once every 10 hours and 32 minutes (35,500 km/h)
Uranus:
~4x the size of Earth
orbits once every 30799 days (6.81 km/s)
rotates once every 17 hours and 14 minutes (9,320 km/h)
Neptune:
~3.8x the size of Earth
orbits once every 60373 days (5.43 km/s)
rotates once every 16 hours and 6 minutes (9,660 km/h)
So, aside from the obvious conclusion that the further the planet is away from the Sun, the longer it takes to orbit, there are a few other observations. Planets tend to get bigger the further away they are from the Sun, although size seems to be mostly determined by their composition. And, planet rotate faster the further away they get from the Sun - due to lesser gravity or the size they achieve, I'm not sure.
Will this affect how we organize our websites? With the example of Slashdot being a Sun, could it mean that it's closest planet will end up the size of Jupiter? Or should we compress it down somehow, much like gravity compresses down planets, or would tampering with the fact that the size of a web page determines the size of the planets cripple the educational aspect somehow?
Source: Various Wikipedia articles.
Notes: Universe Hierarchy
So, the first step to structuring a game based on the final frontier is to understand how the final frontier is structured. So, here are notes I took, trying to understand how the universe is structured.
Hierarchy of the Universe
Now , for the purpose of keeping this somewhat simple, we start on the lowest level of your common moon. The hierarchy goes as such.
Moon --> Planet --> Sun --> Galaxy --> Cluster --> Supercluster
Galactic centers are highly speculative, perhaps full of black holes or larger suns with huge gravitational pull. So stars in a galaxy relate to each other, but have no definitive center like a Sun is to a solar system.
Clusters are a bunch of galaxies that have a common attracting point, and are pretty much moving together through the Universe as it expands. The Milky Way galaxy is part of the "Local Cluster"Again, this common point of attraction is fairly vague, speculated to be dark matter. The cluster does not have a clear orbit like a solar system - as a matter of fact, in approximately 3 billion years our Milky Way galaxy will be crashing into the Andromeda galaxy. Good to know, huh?
Clusters can also be bound together into a Supercluster, as scientists have termed it, but it's not entirely certain that they work like the smaller clusters, so for the sake of this project, we'll ignore superclusters.
So what does this mean for our project? The current plan is to scan the internet and let site with a lot of links rise to be the Suns and maybe more could be changed. Since there is no definitive center for things like galaxies and clusters, having a site "represent it" would be puzzling. So perhaps sites that become Suns merely orbit around the "center" of the galaxy and perhaps group closer or further depending on their relationships - in which case, we may not need to go to a cluster level at all.
Another thought is looking at the spiral structure of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The galaxy has "arms" that spiral outwards from the galactic center. Could websites be organized into arms based on content or amount of links? it's something to think about, because then we wouldn't have to worry about the cluster level at all, and everything could be contained into one spiral galaxy form for exploration.
Main Source
Hierarchy of the Universe
Now , for the purpose of keeping this somewhat simple, we start on the lowest level of your common moon. The hierarchy goes as such.
Moon --> Planet --> Sun --> Galaxy --> Cluster --> Supercluster
Galactic centers are highly speculative, perhaps full of black holes or larger suns with huge gravitational pull. So stars in a galaxy relate to each other, but have no definitive center like a Sun is to a solar system.
Clusters are a bunch of galaxies that have a common attracting point, and are pretty much moving together through the Universe as it expands. The Milky Way galaxy is part of the "Local Cluster"Again, this common point of attraction is fairly vague, speculated to be dark matter. The cluster does not have a clear orbit like a solar system - as a matter of fact, in approximately 3 billion years our Milky Way galaxy will be crashing into the Andromeda galaxy. Good to know, huh?
Clusters can also be bound together into a Supercluster, as scientists have termed it, but it's not entirely certain that they work like the smaller clusters, so for the sake of this project, we'll ignore superclusters.
So what does this mean for our project? The current plan is to scan the internet and let site with a lot of links rise to be the Suns and maybe more could be changed. Since there is no definitive center for things like galaxies and clusters, having a site "represent it" would be puzzling. So perhaps sites that become Suns merely orbit around the "center" of the galaxy and perhaps group closer or further depending on their relationships - in which case, we may not need to go to a cluster level at all.
Another thought is looking at the spiral structure of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The galaxy has "arms" that spiral outwards from the galactic center. Could websites be organized into arms based on content or amount of links? it's something to think about, because then we wouldn't have to worry about the cluster level at all, and everything could be contained into one spiral galaxy form for exploration.
Main Source
FAQ version 1.0
Jasper recently sent me an e-mail where he responded to all the reviews we got from our Pool intents. I thought it might help answer some question if I posted it here.
Interface is a great topic, and conceptualization of the World Wide Web is something that, though often explored, has plenty of room for more exploration.
I am wondering: You are talking about creating an interface where navigation is through space -- literally. How will this interface affect the way we view Web pages? At what point does the space interface end?
The point isn't about websearching or viewing the webpage. You get a distilled gist of what's there for understanding, but after that, it's about the relationships. The 'space interface' ends when we keep the real terms, like pinging or traceroutes, so there's an affiliation of a mechanism to a common term.
Great idea! I would love to see this as a functioning internet based game. The most interesting feature would be that as time progresses, the game would change due to links changes, new websites popping up etc.
That was the original point!
I like the flash file shown, obviously it is pretty beta, but it shows what is going on quite well.
The swf file was a demonstration of an algorithm, and that's about it.
This is where you may have some problems. I'm thinking that number crunching the entire internet will be a taxing (to say the least) thing to do for even the most powerful computers. Also, when exploring the web like this, do you see images, text, just the name of the websites? Do you block out pornography or violence or is it unfiltered?
We never figured we'd ever explore it all. Exploration is done on a website to website basis by individual users who contibute their findings to the pool of knowlege. The full implementation will have the majority of downloading/analysis/etc done on their own computer without the server helping them out. This is distributed computing, and helps solve the vastness of it all. The prototype, for the sake of time or proof-of-concept, helps along the users by doing most of the work for their computers.
Since the content itself is not portrayed, but rather a representation of it, it wouldn't be viewable. If you visit a porn site, you'd find a very mineral-rich (media) planet with minimal poplation (text). Other details, such as the arrangement of media/text, or other types, depends on the makeup of the website.
The concept described here is very interesting. A visual representation of the internet is a topic that has been attempted before but a feasible navigation system has yet to be employed. Your method seems rooted in an easy pattern that could yield some pretty layouts and connections. I'm curious as to how navigation will be enhanced with this method.
We're not in it for feasibility, or is it about navigating the internet per se. This isn't an alternative search engine. It's not about searching, it's about exploration. Navigation/searching implies that there's knowlege (mapping) there already, whereas this is about discovering those structures, and learning the user about how it all works at the same time. Navigation will exist obviously, and we're gearing it towards a logical breakdown so it's fairly easy.
You'll start to get an exponentially increasing amount of data as you crawl your way through the net to build your connections. What language do you intend to develop this project?
The database design will have to reflect this, both on the WWW level, and IP level. It shouldn't be a problem though, since mapping the internet at top speed isn't in the scope of this project. A user doesn't want to sit there for a half hour while the program figures out a webpage, but beyond that, not so much.
The prototype is in php/mysql/python/etc. The full implementation will likely be mysql/c++/etc... more client-side processing with more efficient languages.
I like the idea of the internet as a space where objects are given a weight and position. This idea (and the .swf graphic) make me think of planet systems with each entity given gravity. I wonder how these relationships between sites can be associated under your new system.
I wonder that too.
The .swf file was an algorithm idea demonstration. The real thing wouldn't animate, but would just update the positions to the end result. The clusters would probably be a lot bigger (read: internet sized), which is why I need a faster, more effective algorithm. Most likely, the position data in the database for stars would be processed on the back-end by a separate program (perhaps c++ or something), and updated the db contents occasionally.
I think the concept is very interesting and has potential to be useful, although it doesn't seem very useful right away. I never have trouble finding information on the internet currently, but I suppose if enough relationships are made and the nodes are moved enough, it could be a bit easier to find what information you are searching for on the web.
That's really not the point of the project at all. It's about exploring, not searching. It's an educational tool to help give a better understanding of what this whole Internet thing is, how it works, the relationships, and the mechanics.
Some of the potential directions of this project imply that "planets" might be evaluated as to the quality of their resources; Ryan Schaller's review, for example, asks whether a media-rich site packed with ads would score as high on the game as a less media-rich but more content-rich site such as a Wikipedia page. ALICE is an example of a project based deliberately on this sort of evaluation. This AI spiders the Web, turning happy every time it finds useful resources but unhappy every time it runs into pop-ups, commercials, and other Internet "trash."
The details and attributes of a website are taken into account, but not acted upon, unless the user has an emotional reaction of some sort, where he/she punches his/her monitor. We don't evaluate the 'quality', since the project is about an objective analysis of a site. This will only be surface-level too, since interfacing with a search engine is beyond the scope of this project (How would we write a program that can interface with any search engine in existance, generically?). If we came across Wikipedia.org, it'd look at the front face contents, and move on. If someone linked to a wikipedia article in their page front-face, then that would be explored, as well as any links to other articles from that page. That'd be sort of the trigger that causes the exploration.
The program understands the mechanics of the internet, is given some tools to evaluate/explore, but in the end, it tries to make as few assumptions as possible, so it can work anywhere on anything. We know what wikipedia.org is, but would the program if it came across it? Same with google. There's no way it could fully tap the information google references.
Any information gathered is processed and stored based on the heirarchy of the link.
like the general direction you guys are headed with this concept. However, im not so sure how this as a game would really succeed. Maybe if you guys made it more of an encyclopedia of the net? This reminds me of the wayback-machine, but maybe with some really clever interface, like you how you described servs as planets or something. I think a cataloging of the net could offer up several uses; user statistics, comon trends, popular sites. WikiWeb =p
If people learn, then it has succeeded. Mapping out the internet isn't bad either.
The project is not a search engine. Some distilled data about some things (vague I know), may be gathered/processed, though.
I am curious how your game would quantify the "richness of content on a website", in terms of how much resources you can mine from the site. Would a website that was packed with advertisements, yet little useful information be more resource-rich than a website with minimal images, yet loads of information (ie., a Wikipedia page). Would the popular sites run out of resources faster than not-so-popular sites? This could encourage people to go search for sites that haven't been mined by others as much, so that there can still be resources to be found.
We wouldn't, like that. We can barely get voice recognition working, or spam filters.. let alone two people for a capstone focused on a different scope of development making something that can determine something like that.
When someone explores a particular place, and uplaod that data, they are tagged as the explorers, and people can't re-explore that (They can update the data though).
The success of this proposal depends on the appropriateness of two metaphors: the suggestion that cyberspace is like outer space, and that the Web resources found there are like planetary resources to be documented and mined for content. The first metaphor is both appropriate and inappropriate:: physical space is indefinitely expandable (appropriate), but its planets are separated by different distances (inappropriate). (For more on the usefulness of space as network metaphor, see "Is Cyberspace Really a Space" in your Del.icio.us links.) The second metaphor seems largely inappropriate: a carryover from the industrial age, it suggests that Web resources are rivalrous goods (see Del.icio.us'd Wikipedia article). It therefore seems to me that the underlying metaphor either needs to be changed or that the interface is a industrial-age game superimposed on an information-age network. I'm not sure how interesting the latter would be, since it seems to defeat what's interesting about the Internet in the first place; see Entropy8Zuper's Guernica (In Relationships) for a precedent. More interesting, I think, would be to rethink the "space mining" metaphor to match the new economic realities of the information age.
I guess I don't see how that's vitally important. There are some key differences, but they don't affect where the idea came from, or where it's going (in negative ways). It's enough similar. The original idea was to use the internet itself as game content (As opposed to a few hundred megs of data packed into files individually installed onto people's computers). The idea was meant to break away from server-centric models, where despite that we have this amazing network at our disposal, still tend to have one computer connected to one server, and our understanding/scope doesn't reach far beyond that.
Webpages linking to one another is about the best we've done to 'reach out' from a server/site centric model.
Space (ie 3 dimensions) may be too literal. In a sense, the internet is 0-dimensional, and n-dimensional. There's no (without tying it into real space) real way of determining the 'position' of a web-page in 'cybserspace'. Whether we represent that as 2D or 3D is quite irrelevant, since either will be highly arbitrary. Most things are arbitrary.
My question is, you're talking about the 'appropriateness' of the metaphor... appropriateness to what? Instead of planets, we could have marshmellows. Links between webpages could be represented as flaming squirrels shooting eyelasers from one marshmellow to another. The point of the project, and its goals would still be met. Space-exploration makes a good amount of sense, and makes the theme cohesive as a whole. We considered having towns instead of planets, states instead of solar systems, and navigation was primarily WoW-like. That seemed too dorky.
Is there a possibility that someone might mistake what we're attempting to convey, in that we're making assertions about astronomy? Maybe. Does it matter? The conception differs from astronomy enough to trigger that realization anyway. The metaphor at least gives us a solid ground of comparison, to convey complex understandings. Most metaphors abandon certain practicalities in order to accomplish this, anyway. Even though planets don't disappear and reappear, typically speaking in real life, having a metaphor that depicts this as happening, tying the occurance to servers that keep crashing or going down, conveys behavior about the behavior of servers, and how they differ from what we normally understand, and not about planets. Metaphors are great at pointing out similarities and differences. Space exploration is the reality-based basis of understanding in which to start making comparisons, both for and against.
The key is to tie that model as accurately and informatively into the heirarchy-network structure of the Internet, and how it works. After that, the representation is up in the air, with perhaps some attempts being more convoluted than others.
Interface is a great topic, and conceptualization of the World Wide Web is something that, though often explored, has plenty of room for more exploration.
I am wondering: You are talking about creating an interface where navigation is through space -- literally. How will this interface affect the way we view Web pages? At what point does the space interface end?
The point isn't about websearching or viewing the webpage. You get a distilled gist of what's there for understanding, but after that, it's about the relationships. The 'space interface' ends when we keep the real terms, like pinging or traceroutes, so there's an affiliation of a mechanism to a common term.
Great idea! I would love to see this as a functioning internet based game. The most interesting feature would be that as time progresses, the game would change due to links changes, new websites popping up etc.
That was the original point!
I like the flash file shown, obviously it is pretty beta, but it shows what is going on quite well.
The swf file was a demonstration of an algorithm, and that's about it.
This is where you may have some problems. I'm thinking that number crunching the entire internet will be a taxing (to say the least) thing to do for even the most powerful computers. Also, when exploring the web like this, do you see images, text, just the name of the websites? Do you block out pornography or violence or is it unfiltered?
We never figured we'd ever explore it all. Exploration is done on a website to website basis by individual users who contibute their findings to the pool of knowlege. The full implementation will have the majority of downloading/analysis/etc done on their own computer without the server helping them out. This is distributed computing, and helps solve the vastness of it all. The prototype, for the sake of time or proof-of-concept, helps along the users by doing most of the work for their computers.
Since the content itself is not portrayed, but rather a representation of it, it wouldn't be viewable. If you visit a porn site, you'd find a very mineral-rich (media) planet with minimal poplation (text). Other details, such as the arrangement of media/text, or other types, depends on the makeup of the website.
The concept described here is very interesting. A visual representation of the internet is a topic that has been attempted before but a feasible navigation system has yet to be employed. Your method seems rooted in an easy pattern that could yield some pretty layouts and connections. I'm curious as to how navigation will be enhanced with this method.
We're not in it for feasibility, or is it about navigating the internet per se. This isn't an alternative search engine. It's not about searching, it's about exploration. Navigation/searching implies that there's knowlege (mapping) there already, whereas this is about discovering those structures, and learning the user about how it all works at the same time. Navigation will exist obviously, and we're gearing it towards a logical breakdown so it's fairly easy.
You'll start to get an exponentially increasing amount of data as you crawl your way through the net to build your connections. What language do you intend to develop this project?
The database design will have to reflect this, both on the WWW level, and IP level. It shouldn't be a problem though, since mapping the internet at top speed isn't in the scope of this project. A user doesn't want to sit there for a half hour while the program figures out a webpage, but beyond that, not so much.
The prototype is in php/mysql/python/etc. The full implementation will likely be mysql/c++/etc... more client-side processing with more efficient languages.
I like the idea of the internet as a space where objects are given a weight and position. This idea (and the .swf graphic) make me think of planet systems with each entity given gravity. I wonder how these relationships between sites can be associated under your new system.
I wonder that too.
The .swf file was an algorithm idea demonstration. The real thing wouldn't animate, but would just update the positions to the end result. The clusters would probably be a lot bigger (read: internet sized), which is why I need a faster, more effective algorithm. Most likely, the position data in the database for stars would be processed on the back-end by a separate program (perhaps c++ or something), and updated the db contents occasionally.
I think the concept is very interesting and has potential to be useful, although it doesn't seem very useful right away. I never have trouble finding information on the internet currently, but I suppose if enough relationships are made and the nodes are moved enough, it could be a bit easier to find what information you are searching for on the web.
That's really not the point of the project at all. It's about exploring, not searching. It's an educational tool to help give a better understanding of what this whole Internet thing is, how it works, the relationships, and the mechanics.
Some of the potential directions of this project imply that "planets" might be evaluated as to the quality of their resources; Ryan Schaller's review, for example, asks whether a media-rich site packed with ads would score as high on the game as a less media-rich but more content-rich site such as a Wikipedia page. ALICE is an example of a project based deliberately on this sort of evaluation. This AI spiders the Web, turning happy every time it finds useful resources but unhappy every time it runs into pop-ups, commercials, and other Internet "trash."
The details and attributes of a website are taken into account, but not acted upon, unless the user has an emotional reaction of some sort, where he/she punches his/her monitor. We don't evaluate the 'quality', since the project is about an objective analysis of a site. This will only be surface-level too, since interfacing with a search engine is beyond the scope of this project (How would we write a program that can interface with any search engine in existance, generically?). If we came across Wikipedia.org, it'd look at the front face contents, and move on. If someone linked to a wikipedia article in their page front-face, then that would be explored, as well as any links to other articles from that page. That'd be sort of the trigger that causes the exploration.
The program understands the mechanics of the internet, is given some tools to evaluate/explore, but in the end, it tries to make as few assumptions as possible, so it can work anywhere on anything. We know what wikipedia.org is, but would the program if it came across it? Same with google. There's no way it could fully tap the information google references.
Any information gathered is processed and stored based on the heirarchy of the link.
like the general direction you guys are headed with this concept. However, im not so sure how this as a game would really succeed. Maybe if you guys made it more of an encyclopedia of the net? This reminds me of the wayback-machine, but maybe with some really clever interface, like you how you described servs as planets or something. I think a cataloging of the net could offer up several uses; user statistics, comon trends, popular sites. WikiWeb =p
If people learn, then it has succeeded. Mapping out the internet isn't bad either.
The project is not a search engine. Some distilled data about some things (vague I know), may be gathered/processed, though.
I am curious how your game would quantify the "richness of content on a website", in terms of how much resources you can mine from the site. Would a website that was packed with advertisements, yet little useful information be more resource-rich than a website with minimal images, yet loads of information (ie., a Wikipedia page). Would the popular sites run out of resources faster than not-so-popular sites? This could encourage people to go search for sites that haven't been mined by others as much, so that there can still be resources to be found.
We wouldn't, like that. We can barely get voice recognition working, or spam filters.. let alone two people for a capstone focused on a different scope of development making something that can determine something like that.
When someone explores a particular place, and uplaod that data, they are tagged as the explorers, and people can't re-explore that (They can update the data though).
The success of this proposal depends on the appropriateness of two metaphors: the suggestion that cyberspace is like outer space, and that the Web resources found there are like planetary resources to be documented and mined for content. The first metaphor is both appropriate and inappropriate:: physical space is indefinitely expandable (appropriate), but its planets are separated by different distances (inappropriate). (For more on the usefulness of space as network metaphor, see "Is Cyberspace Really a Space" in your Del.icio.us links.) The second metaphor seems largely inappropriate: a carryover from the industrial age, it suggests that Web resources are rivalrous goods (see Del.icio.us'd Wikipedia article). It therefore seems to me that the underlying metaphor either needs to be changed or that the interface is a industrial-age game superimposed on an information-age network. I'm not sure how interesting the latter would be, since it seems to defeat what's interesting about the Internet in the first place; see Entropy8Zuper's Guernica (In Relationships) for a precedent. More interesting, I think, would be to rethink the "space mining" metaphor to match the new economic realities of the information age.
I guess I don't see how that's vitally important. There are some key differences, but they don't affect where the idea came from, or where it's going (in negative ways). It's enough similar. The original idea was to use the internet itself as game content (As opposed to a few hundred megs of data packed into files individually installed onto people's computers). The idea was meant to break away from server-centric models, where despite that we have this amazing network at our disposal, still tend to have one computer connected to one server, and our understanding/scope doesn't reach far beyond that.
Webpages linking to one another is about the best we've done to 'reach out' from a server/site centric model.
Space (ie 3 dimensions) may be too literal. In a sense, the internet is 0-dimensional, and n-dimensional. There's no (without tying it into real space) real way of determining the 'position' of a web-page in 'cybserspace'. Whether we represent that as 2D or 3D is quite irrelevant, since either will be highly arbitrary. Most things are arbitrary.
My question is, you're talking about the 'appropriateness' of the metaphor... appropriateness to what? Instead of planets, we could have marshmellows. Links between webpages could be represented as flaming squirrels shooting eyelasers from one marshmellow to another. The point of the project, and its goals would still be met. Space-exploration makes a good amount of sense, and makes the theme cohesive as a whole. We considered having towns instead of planets, states instead of solar systems, and navigation was primarily WoW-like. That seemed too dorky.
Is there a possibility that someone might mistake what we're attempting to convey, in that we're making assertions about astronomy? Maybe. Does it matter? The conception differs from astronomy enough to trigger that realization anyway. The metaphor at least gives us a solid ground of comparison, to convey complex understandings. Most metaphors abandon certain practicalities in order to accomplish this, anyway. Even though planets don't disappear and reappear, typically speaking in real life, having a metaphor that depicts this as happening, tying the occurance to servers that keep crashing or going down, conveys behavior about the behavior of servers, and how they differ from what we normally understand, and not about planets. Metaphors are great at pointing out similarities and differences. Space exploration is the reality-based basis of understanding in which to start making comparisons, both for and against.
The key is to tie that model as accurately and informatively into the heirarchy-network structure of the Internet, and how it works. After that, the representation is up in the air, with perhaps some attempts being more convoluted than others.
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