Geography of Hyperlinks—Spatial Dimensions of Local Government Websites
Krzysztof Janc · European Planning Studies · 2014
The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the connections in cyberspace relate in any way to borders as understood in geographical terms. This goal requires testing Tobler's First Law of Geography. Analyses of hyperlinks come under the domain of webometrics, which seeks to answer the fundamental question: Is it possible to measure the Web? This study identified all websites which have hyperlinked to the websites of local authorities in the region of Lower Silesia. These websites were classified by the geographical location of the entity determining their content and thematic category. On the whole, it can be said that connections in cyberspace largely reflect actual functional borders. However, the main functional node dominating cyberspace is a country's capital.