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Focus

A Geographic content confluence… 25 Geographic Blog Topics

Gravity Model

I continue to notice that there are just not enough people blogging on geography or other concepts which are moderately academic in nature. To that end I have set forth to think of 25 ideas to stimulate the hidden geographers out there, who are also bloggers and have a desire to document a sense of space. Social commentary on a geographic concepts just might be interesting and so I have put together a list of items for consideration/stealing.

  1. What is the geographic distribution of the people YOU are following on Twitter?
  2. What is the most interesting place you found on accident while on a business trip?
  3. Determine the applicability of a “virtual” [tag]gravity model[/tag] and where a [tag]meme[/tag] started
  4. A virtual survey of barn types available of [tag]Flickr[/tag].
  5. Map YOUR 2001 Summer Tour with [tag]Widespread Panic[/tag]
  6. A content analysis of blog posts tagged as [tag]Georgia[/tag]
  7. Map the places you have visited on business via [tag]Google[/tag] maps
  8. Why I don’t ever want to go to [tag]Orlando[/tag] again for a conference
  9. Determine the geographic distribution of [tag]Technorati[/tag]’s [tag]top 100[/tag] blogs
  10. Does the core periphery model apply to blogs hosted by [tag]Harvard[/tag], with Cambridge as the core?
  11. Why the view at (insert venue) makes it the best place to see live music outdoors
  12. Contrast and compare the level of education associated with bloggers in [tag]Bezerkly[/tag], [tag]Madison[/tag], [tag]Ann Arbor[/tag] and [tag]Austin[/tag]?
  13. Where is the worst place to have a conference?
  14. What airport has the best localized representation of food stuff and gear?
  15. A geographic survey of Uncle Jay’s blog roll, by type, relative to the 2004 presidential red and [tag]blue states[/tag].
  16. What cities are all of your [tag]Grateful Dead[/tag] T-shirts from?
  17. How long must one travel to consider it a roadtrip?
  18. Where are the randoms from in your [tag]Facebook[/tag] network from?
  19. Where is the best show you NEVER went to from in your live music collection?
  20. Why the roads in [tag]Boston[/tag] made me late for my customer meeting – AGAIN!
  21. Where is the best sports stadium in the world?
  22. The different between avenues and streets in NYC
  23. Where is the best place to do nothing at?
  24. A survey of cities where you actually saw more than the airport, hotel and office/conference center
  25. What is the smallest city you actually flew to and why?

Do you have a hidden geographer?

A quick note of appreciation to 3 folks that I synthesized this from – [tag]Chris Carfi[/tag] (business travel posts), [tag]Chris Brogan[/tag] (conference twitter posts and 100 list) and [tag]Jeremiah Owyang[/tag] (meme following)

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October 27, 2007 by
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Thesis Fodder: A Geographic Content analysis

In a reasonably unscientific manner I’ve noticed what I think might be an interesting/plausible relationship in how regionalization may impact blog content. Content development, presentation and geospatial references appear to vary based on where a blogger hails from:

1. If not in the california, boston or NYC – geographic references are limited. If in these locations, location dropping is all the rage. Of course there are exceptions, that’s why I referred to it as a [tag]content analysis[/tag] and unscientific, mainly just a casual observation.

2. There may be an east coast west coast blogging style.

I’m curious if there are other styles base on geography, but due to the first casual observation in item #1 and the limited content survey (<30 blogs and <100 posts), I just haven’t seen a pattern outside of east and west. Have you?

So assuming observation #1 is a reasonable observation, then what are the east and west coast attributes which define the pattern/mode/style? While overly simplistic, the gaps appear to be in frequency and length of post. West coast bloggers appear to have fewer words in in any single post (initial data indicates potentially up to 20%), are more “linky” and more posts in a given week, while east coast bloggers appear to be more verbose and posting at a slightly lower weekly post velocity.

That being said, it appears that weekly words are really close, thats right “spitting distance”. This might be a thesis topic for some creative writing wonk on the average writing capacity of any given person. PLEASE NOTE: I’ve done none of the math to validate correlation of any of these assertions.

This is a great opportunity for some budding social geographer out there who is bored with house types, the impact of infrastructure or capitalism on the the landscape and [tag]land tenure[/tag] analysis. A virtual understanding of site, situation and place as expressed by blogged content. C’mon – it’s just math.

Four sets of data with the same correlation of 0.81

As a southern blogger, I’m almost afraid to slice the states to a more regional level, at least I’m too lazy to do the work, after all east coast/west coast worked for rappers, it will work for bloggers.

[tag]twitter[/tag] is a [tag]social geography[/tag] [tag]thesis[/tag] waiting to happen!

October 23, 2007 by
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B-Travel – 3PM a new low in hotel internet fees

So there are 2 things I think are really horrible about hotels – room service fees (food quality too) and Internet fees. I’ve seen some really crazy fees for both, but internet fees are just illogical. I paid ₤22,00 once for a day and a couple of weeks ago, I paid for €88 for 5 days. I paid for five days because I could get 2 devices and share the connection.

So types of things I have seen in the marketplace:

[tag]Swisscom[/tag]: multiple plans, but the most interesting was a time AND bandwidth limited account with overage fee (what?!?!), as i noted above I opted for the multi-day and multiple device plan

[tag]Four Seasons[/tag]: I don’t remember the location but it was like $24.95 or almost the 50% of my monthly bandwidth fees from my cable provider.

[tag]t-Mobile[/tag]: I like t-mobile’s hotspots, but I normally only use a connection for 2-3 hours, since its typically a airport stop. I have been lucky enough to stay at a hotel which had t-Mobile, but only like twice. In that case it was well worth the $9.99 fee for the day pass.

But the winner on weird configurations for the week was [tag]Wayport[/tag], a session until 3PM. The session is static and I only got like 1 hour in my session for like $9.99, apparently these folks cannot program the logic to manage dynamic sessions or maybe they are just greedy. The art of effectively pricing a captive audience.

Optimistic Prediction: Cell phone wireless cards will more or less obsolete paid wireless connections just like pay phones. I don’t remember the last time I used a pay phone and I long for the day I can’t remember typing in my credit card number for an abusive rate to rent a commodity pipe from a hotel. Although, the real irony is that low end hotels offer FREE wireless – why is that?

October 13, 2007 by
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Growing up web…

So the post below made me think of the guy who introduced me to why it is important to understand this whole web thing – Jeff Fergurson from wunderground.org. When I met Jeff it was on a porch in Ypsilanti, Michigan at friend’s house named Mike Foster, had to be 1997 or 98 and he look like he did below, bottom right:

All I remember was the absolute kindness of the guy, his willingness to chat about his work gig and his passion for his kids. This was a guy I wanted to emulate. I was very happy when I was first able to pay him money for weather on a portal I was the PM on, we scrapped the portal and I lost touch when I left Ann Arbor in 2001 and moved my life. So I decided to look him up with a universal search query and sure enough – same cool cat.

Jeff Ferguson

only gray… I can’t talk I have some cool gray hair when I grow a beard.   I’ve linked them in through my blog for appreciation of his insights and consistent efforts towards [tag]sustainable agriculture[/tag].

NOTE: [tag]Ann Arbor[/tag] was green before [tag]carbon credits[/tag] were cool.

October 6, 2007 by
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