Geotagging the World – and What we Can Learn

Check out this cool visualization of how cities are photographed by Eric Fischer. The idea is to see how people’s experiences are documented and how locals and tourists see the same things through a different cultural lens. Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month). Take a look at San Francisco below. This is almost like looking at virus outbreaks in a city — explosions of culture…

San Francisco, CA

Intersection of Culture and Design

Christoph Niemann’s illustrations are an amazing amalgamation of design and culture. The most recent images to appear in the NY Times are incredible. Niemann takes Google Maps to a whole new level…

Look familiar?

How far can you get from a McDonalds?

Not far enough, it seems. Only 145 miles, which isn’t much in this vast country of ours — and that’s in North Dakota.

Jesus. There is nowhere to run.

The 7 Somewhat United States of Facebook

This is great work by Peter Warden, a former Apple engineer. He started scraping public profiles and photos from hundreds of millions of Facebook accounts about a year ago, and now has data collected from more than 200 million around the world. Seems Facebook users in the U.S. can be roughly segmented into seven regions, which he named facetiously:

• Stayathomia: This belt’s defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don’t move far.
• Dixie: Like Stayathomia, Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country.
• Greater Texas: Unlike Stayathomia, there’s a definite central city to this cluster, otherwise most towns just connect to their immediate neighbors.
• Mormonia: The only region that’s completely surrounded by another cluster, Mormonia mostly consists of Utah towns that are highly connected to each other, with an offshoot in Eastern Idaho.
• Nomadic West: The defining feature of this area is how likely even small towns are to be strongly connected to distant cities; it looks like the inhabitants have done a lot of moving around the county.
• Socalistan: LA is definitely the center of gravity for this cluster. Almost everywhere in California and Nevada has links to both LA and SF, but LA is usually first.
• Pacifica: Tightly connected to each other, it doesn’t look like Washingtonians are big travelers compared to the rest of the West, even though a lot of them claim to need a vacation

The US of Facebook