NZRS recently announced the launch of the Internet Data Portal, a place where we expect to publish Open Data about the Internet in New Zealand that can be useful for researchers, policy makers and those data tinkerers out there.
One of the datasets in IDP is the .nz Zone Scan, an effort that's been going on for over 2 years where we scan all .nz domains in the registry and check for a variety of desirable and undesirable configurations at the DNS level.
One of the data points we collect is IP addresses for DNS servers, Web servers and Mail servers of each domain. Using a GeoIP database (MaxMind being our preference), you can map those addresses to a country. Finally the data is aggregated to count how many domains have servers in each country on each zone scan, a quite interesting dataset.
Combining a little bit of Javascript, with Google Charts we can make a dashboard to explore the dataset. The map below shows the percentage of domains with a given type of server on each country. The color bar adjusts to the corresponding maximum when the dataset is changed.
Finally, using D3 we could generate an animated map that shows the changes of concentration across time. Use the play button to roll the time. The changes are really subtle for the distribution of DNS Servers, but you can see how United States change band in May 2014, or Australia increases their market share at the end of 2013.
We encourage users to take advantage of this dataset and create beautiful visualizations. This is only a little showcase of the possibilities, looking forward to see some creative work with this!