What's all this then?

This is an experiment, begun in September 2007. This website is building a database of word associations, in an attempt to map The Mind of The Internet. I should clarify. This is only marginally illustrative of the people who use the internet. People are included, but they are not the point. The internet is a massive interconnected system of human and hardware entities. In our travels around the web, we share the road with search engines, bots, spiders, compromised personal computers, and other automatons. Generally to us, they are invisible. They are silent ghosts. As such, traffic to any given website consists of some human-generated requests and some computer-generated requests. Most web traffic analysis seeks to render this traffic invisible, to filter it from our view. This project embraces it. Rather than "what do the people of the internet think", the question here is "what does the internet think" ?

How?

On the home page, a random word is displayed (the "prime"). Three other random words are displayed with it. Each of the three words is linked, allowing any site visitor to cast their vote regarding which word is best associated with the prime word. Words and link clicks are tracked, each revealing a tiny bit more of The Mind of The Internet. The words used here are the first 300 words in "Fry's 1000", which cover about 65% of the printed English language.




(try now)  (view report)