Eric Fischer has created a series of maps showing the locations of the users of Twitter and Flickr. I find this fascinating. Click on the image above to see a larger version. A high-res copy is here.
Mr. Fischer wrote a program that uses the geo-tagging features of the two services. In a comment on Flicker he wrote:
There’s not a whole lot of technology behind it. It’s a C program that runs through the photos/tweets in chronological order, plotting the earliest ones the most brightly and stepping the brightness down for points that don’t show up for the first time until later on.
The points on the maps are allowed to diffuse by a few pixels when there is an additional record for a point that is already plotted, with the brightness falling off exponentially as the point that is actually plotted gets further from its intended location.
Mr. Fischer also created zoomed-in maps of several dozen cities around the world. Here is one example — New York.
I too find these kind of maps fascinating. Some things of special interest to me is how the areas of charismatic landscape show up very well. You can track I-90 from Sioux Falls across SD and then there is that cluster of twitter pictures at the Bad Lands and then another at the Black Hills. North of there in NW SD, NE WY and E MT is one of the larger areas of lowest density of Twitter activity. Lake Superior is outline very well.
An oddity is the relatively heavy picture activity in Red River valley Between Fargo and Winnipeg. I figure this was people taking pictures of this spring and summers floods. Lots of photo activity north of Bismarck ND. Most likely photos of the spillway at Garrison dam from back in June.
Disappointing to see that a large part of the BWCA can be twittered from as well as how distinct Isle Royal NP shows up. But Quetico still has limited twitter capability.