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Comment by 0nly1ife | Hacker News Reader

Cool idea, but I think the data is skewed by population density, for example, the map shows Juarez as being more touristy than the Grand Canyon. A better approach might be to map the ratio of photos to population density.

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Yup: http://uuorld.com/gallery?image=89

That's one of the coolest maps I've seen in a while. Thank you.

Thx. Me and http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=martian wrote the software to make it. Martian made that particular map.

Where did you get the data? Is it free? I'd love to make some realtime software like this.

Many places. World Bank, Census, IMF etc. Do a text search on this page: http://uuorld.com/portal/ for "set:" Each set is free from its source but they require lots of tedious massaging to reformat.

I thought we were talking about user submitted, geo-tagged photographs?

Why the downvote? I'm genuinely confused. I guess I could have read the link better, maybe this thread isn't talking about that?

I didn't down-vote you but I was talking about the raw statistics used as input to the visualization engine. I had assumed you wanted to build some data-visualization software and was pointing out the places to get stats.

It sounds like the guy who compiled the data is thinking of doing that too:

http://www.bluemoon.ee/~ahti/touristiness-map/

Agreed, it pretty much follows population density. Some notable exceptions are Utah, Colorado, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Smoky Mountains (on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina), the Carolina beaches, Vermont, northern New Hampshire, and the Adirondacks of New York.

Upper Michigan has some definite breaks with population density. Escanaba has nothing, while Mackinac Island is very bright. Closer to home, there are hotspots at Houghton/Hancock and Copper Harbor, but emptiness in between, whereas Calumet/Laurium is quite a bit more populous than anywhere farther up the peninsula.

Another exception is the Oregon Coast (where I grow up) It's bright yellow but pretty much no one lives there (relatively speaking). For example, the county I grew up, Lincoln County, is roughly the size of Rhode Island but has only around 45,000 people (figures from memory).

But it is extremely touristy. Highway 101 grinds to a stand still most summer days, especially when it's really hot inland in Portland / Salem / Eugene.

Also, the Antarctic Peninsula.

I am the author of the map. Sure, I will take population into account in the next revision. My main focus when creating this was to discover less touristy places, so I did not pay much attention to cities.

Sure is, Compton is bright yellow, for example :-)

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