A long time ago, before the SteemFest in Amsterdam, I wrote the post Emerging Steem(it) - What does it look like? ELI5
It was meant to provide a visual representation of what is going on within the Steem realm in a way that can be easily understood and visually pleasing to those who are not keen on browsing through the source code in the GitHub repositories.
If you are a casual user that just blogs on Steemit, you may easily miss the big picture of what Steem actually is.
Now, almost two years later, it is time to give you an update:

gource
.Audio track: Instinct - Royalty Free Music from Bensound.
The Taiko Drum is a Japanese percussion instrument featuring this track.
What projects are featured in this visualization?
Of course Steem itself; the software that runs the Steem blockchain, then the Condenser that powers up the Steemit.com site, ImageHoster, a software that allows steemit.com (and other sites that choose to use it) to provide seamless image uploading without leaving post editor.
The Steemit.com site and many other web-based projects are powered by steem-js, the official JavaScript library for the Steem blockchain.
Another interesting project is jussi, appreciated by everyone who provides large-scale Steem-based services; jussi caches and routes API requests to steem nodes and/or microservices.
Regardless of the scale, if a service provider wants to enable interaction with Steem, there’s SteemConnect, which solves the token-based authentication hassle for various Steem services.
Those are the projects that are already up and running, and you might be familiar with them and use them on a daily basis (even without being aware of that).
But there are also such projects as Hivemind, which will be available soon and will power up the platform.
And all those project mentioned above are only the Steemit Inc. part.
Steem is bigger than that.
Take a look at @noisy's SteemProjects. There are over 440 projects listed there. This visualization shows only 15% of them, a small sample of what is happening on the Steem platform.
It DOES NOT include such awesome projects as: SteemMonsters (by @aggroed and @yabapmatt), D.Sound (by @prc), DTube (by @heimindanger), SteemPeak (by @asgarth, @dmytrokorol and @jarvie), and many, many, more.
So when you are talking about Steem during the
Invest in Steem Social Media Blast Day on September 3, to Make STEEM a Top 20 Cryptocurrency, remember about what you have just seen.
If you believe I can be of value to Steem, please vote for me (gtg) as a witness on Steemit's Witnesses List or set (gtg) as a proxy that will vote for witnesses for you.
Your vote does matter!
You can contact me directly on steem.chat, as Gandalf

Power Up, Steem On!