[2] It takes its name from Node, a non-existent magazine in Spook Country owned by Hubertus Bigend, which employs the novel's protagonist to pursue the source of locative art.

[3][4] The project drew attention from the novelist,[5] and has been featured in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Salon, The Seattle Times and the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

[6] The project was initiated when the recipient of an advanced reading copy of the novel mobilised "an army of volunteers" to track the references and assemble the cloud of data surrounding the novel – every element of the work which is searchable on internet resources such as Google and Wikipedia.

[6][7] The pseudonymous author, under the pen name patternBoy, conceived the Node project as "a multi-author blog of fictional news stories in the Spook Country universe", and did not anticipate that it would itself become the focus of media attention.

"[12] He has conceived this as nothing less than a new form of hyper-annotation: What the unknown Node-maestro has done is poles apart…[h]e's channelled the raw material supplied by his volunteers into a sign-posted route through Spook Country.