Inspired by @pnorman’s animation, here’s a year of daily OpenStreetMap tile traffic. One frame per UTC day, from the start of September 2022 through end of August 2023. It’s from the public log aggregates, so some low-traffic tiles are left out for (I assume) efficiency and privacy.
The answers to your questions are:
1. Yacht and rally car races.
2. Yes, well noticed! We call it “Null Island”.
3. No, but it would be nice if it were practical.
4. People scraping tiles.
5. Yes, because the distribution of traffic follows Zipf’s law.
6. If I have time.
@vruba I can guess the questions for the first four answers, but…
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@mirabilos “Are the tile counts nonlinearly scaled for coloring?” and “Why don’t you try [something else]?”
@vruba thanks, this even got me into learning about Zipf’s law a bit.