The Internet Portrait Project

Someone named Andrey is building this ambitious project that he’s title the Internet Portrait. I just found this the other day, and frankly, it looks like he hasn’t done anything with the project since creating the site itself, and adding a couple of his friends on there. What do you think about someone actually making a project like this, except in rails, so that the users could upload their own stuff?

Granted, you’d have to put in a whole bunch of gotcha’s to make sure that:

• The person’s site exists
• They upload a picture of the right size/format/etc…
• The person’s site is theirs (maybe have them upload a little string on the main page?)
• At least I wouldn’t do this, but if someone else did, maybe they would want to make sure that the website is not profane?

I feel like the profanity would be good though, as we’re not making the internet money shot, or the best the internet has to offer, but instead we’re just offering up an honest, as complete as possible, microcosm of what the internet is. Kind of like a photographic approach to the question I was asking in my Wikipedia Networks project.

You can view this project at The Internet Portrait Project

1. What’s the idea?

I literally want to capture a portrait of the internet. The problem is that I can’t assign just one face to such a huge collection of people, pages, and links. All kinds of people take part in building the internet, so to make a portrait, I would need a picture of each one of these people…

And that’s a pretty hard thing to get, so I decided to collect just 400 of these pictures and combine them into one large collage. Hence, The Internet Portrait.