As we enter the era of The Internet of Things ™, in which the number of computer controlled gizmos and gadgets connected to the internet begins to outnumber the number of humans, it’s reassuring to know that someone is keeping tabs on them. In this case, that someone is John Matherly, who works for the Shodan search engine. He’s created a rather impressive map showing where the world’s networked things live – and unsurprisingly there’s a slight regional bias.

North America, Europe, parts of West Asia and the eastern part of South America are the countries with the most technology in the world that’s connected to the internet, according to the map below.

(Click to enlarge.)

Each and every dot represents a product with an internet connection, blue dots indicate a few product in each specific area, while red indicates more products. What strikes us as interesting is not where these sensors and phones proliferate, but where they don’t. China, for example, is surprisingly light on networked things – although that may be because of The Great Firewall. Apparently smart stuff isn’t yet popular in Australia to the extent it is on the East Coast of the US either.

Matherly told Business Insider that he created the map by using a stateless scanner to send a Ping request to every public IPv4 address, keeping track of which IPs responded with a Pong, finding out where the IP is physically located using a GeoIP library and then drawing the map.

[Source – Business Insider, Main Image – CC 2.0 Mikael Altemark]