The first project/link/site is CAIDA: the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis. CAIDA is largely funded by the US NSF although recent projects have been funded by the US Department of Homeland Security, and by CISCO. It might be worth looking at CISCO’s statement on net neutrality – just to contextualize where CISCO’s priorities might lie in terms of network development and governance (alternatively we could look to the CISCO white papers here and here.) This in no way is meant to infer CAIDA’s complicity with these organizations only that there is obviously a focus here on net governance. This leads to an attendant emphasis on traffic flows and there relation to actual network geographies. This has lead to rather novel images of the network such as this one which maps byte transfer rates of traffic from/to Japan as through the passage of the day or this one showing the number of infected hosts carrying the ‘witty worm’ virus. Much of the data collected by CAIDA is novel in that it is concerned with temporally dynamic web and developing a topological perspective of traffic but we should not that the use of client or host based data collection applications still tends to evoke an image of the network as a series of interlinked nodes through which traffic passes. There are a number of interesting technical papers on network infrastracture here. As an indication of CAIDA’s bent have a look at the ‘Day in the Life of the Internet Project’.