Twitter Followers of World Leaders Mapped

A few days ago, Geographic Travels made a post about world leaders on twitter. I have a real love-hate relationship with twitter. Twitter offers a world of possibilities but those are only realized by a small few, myself excluded. I end up bouncing between a world of spam and one of inactivity.

So while the post on world leaders using twitter is great by itself, my geo-eye saw data - raw data that craved to be mapped! I searched how many followers each account had to see if the data held anything of particular interest. I've tried before to measure twitter popularity in an interesting yet 100% non-scientific way in a previous nerd project!

For the map below, I created a new point GIS layer and added info about how many followers each account listed. Now, don't take the scaled symbols too literally. I had to do some scaling when you have Obama at more than 5 million followers and others with barely 1,000. We can't learn much from this map- but it's still cool! I've included the data at the bottom of this post.

The unexpected outlier in this data set is Jordan and Queen Rania Al Abdullah. Although, it doesn't take much to figure out why ;) To find out for yourself, simply do a google search and follower her on twitter @QueenRania.


I mention Geographic Travels in part because they are one of the best geography blogs out there. Good blogs are hard to find and finding a good GEOGRAPHY blog is an even greater challenge.

Along with Geographic Travels, I was fortunate to be listed on the recently named 50 Best Geography Blogs for Geography Geeks. The fact that Samantha Rhodes was able to assemble this list of blogs is an accomplishment by itself. What impresses me most is that the listing actually provides a reasonable description of each blog. When I found out I was on the list I was sure that the description of my blog would be straight from my meta tags. It certainly wasn't.

Samantha provided this snippet to describe World Geo Blog "Read World Geography Blog for global news and views about the immensely intimate relationship between people and places." Its a better description than I could ever come up with and I'm thankful for the recommendation.

Go check out the 50 Best Geography Blogs and let me know what else you find!

Also check out another great geography blog I found - The Basement Geographer.

As promised...The Data!

Canada - 64,600
Chile - 195,000
Costa Rica - 1,100
Denmark - 6,100
Ecuador - 5,700
France - 5,200
Israel - 8,500
Jordan - 1,350,000
Latvia - 3,900
Malaysia - 32,500
Mexico - 110,200
New Zealand - 12,600
Norway - 33,200
Russia - 42,900
South Korea - 23,900
Thailand - 126,000
Turkey - 86,800
UAE - 349,000
UK - 1,750,000
USA - 5,300,000

Online Interest in Geography Declines

Google Trends is a great way to gauge the worlds relative interest in a topic. Why not check out where geography really ranks among the priorities of the world? While Google Trends does not provide the actual or estimated number of searches, it allows you to compare relative popularity over time and between search terms. The Trends data I used is ranked by Geography which means the various numbers relate to the frequency of geography searches as 1. So, if Batman had twice as many searches as Geography, Geography would rate a 1 and Batman a 2. Get it? Good!

Before comparing geography to other topics I looked at the five and a half year history of searches for "geography". I was surprised to see that between 2004 and 2010 there have been fewer and fewer searches for geography. The relative decline can be seen in the chart below.

Geography Trends


So "the world" is searching for geography about one-quarter as often as in 2004.

Lets compare search frequency to that of a successful company with geographic right in their name, National Geographic.

National Geographic


I was a bit surprised to see a magazine have more searches than a core academic discipline. The next chart shows the highs and lows for searches throughout the course of the year in the US alone. It is clear that searches lull in the summer months and peak dramatically in the fall-no doubt related to the traditional academic year.

USA Geography


The Philippines rank as the country with the highest search frequency relative to all other content. Interestingly enough, the peaks in the Philippines are inverted from the US and we see the peaks in the summer months.

Philippines Geography


A quick check of wikipedia, which has no good reason to lie about this, reveals a fascinating tid-bit: the academic year in the Philippines begins in June!

Just for fun, let's go ahead and compare searches for geography with that of a celebrity who has faded fast from the lime light- Paris Hilton. While Paris has command over geography when it comes to google searches, the gap, she's narrowing!

Paris Hilton


So get out there, do some google searches and spread the word about geography!

Google Earth on the iPad

Well over a month after iPads hit stores in the US, the folks at Google have finally released an update to the Google Earth application, including native support for the iPad.

It's about damn time.

Previously the only way to use GE on the iPad was using the iPhone app and the pixel doubler. While it's nice that, as Apple puts it, you can choose from over 200,000 iPhone and iPod touch apps in the App Store, iPad owners know the pixel doubler was basically to allow the promotion of the "over 200,000 apps" pitch. This was painfully apparent with the iPhone Google Earth app. The LatLong blog even said "Some iPad users have noticed that Google Earth has been available for the iPad from the very beginning, but until today, this has simply been the iPhone version running in a scaled-up mode." HA!

Now Google Earth is available in much of its glory on the iPad. The layers are the same available from version 2 of the iPhone GE app with the addition of roads as shown below.




The settings button allows easy toggling of the auto-tilt feature which seems to work much better on the iPad. The user gets the sense of picking up a window on the world. As this update will likely be the last one before iPhone 4, I wonder if there will be additional auto-tilt functionality given the addition of a gyroscope. Side-to-side tilt would really add to the user-experience on the iPad, we'll first have to see if it works on the iPhone.




Overall Google Earth works swimmingly on the iPad, but I do have a few complaints and reservations. I don't understand why the Google Earth functionality can't be added in to the Google Maps application. Satellite imagery is already there, add the ability to sign in to your maps account, add more layers and zoom out to globe (as an option) and you've virtually elimnated the need for the Google Earth app all together. Also, there are a couple of bugs that come with signing in with ones maps account. The Google servers see the application as a third party and do not recognize it. That's not too bad in itself but it is a little silly when Google doesn't recognize itself as "Google Earth". I'm assuming this silly little quirk will be fixed in the next update.



Another frustration is that the panoramio icons don't appear in the Google Earth iPad app until the user is zoomed in much farther than in it's PC counterpart. As someone who uses this layer quite a bit exploring exotic areas all over the wolrd, it's sometimes difficult to know where imagery is available.

I was also really hoping to be able to load, create and record tours. I think the iOS would provide a very immersive tour creation platform. Alas, that is relegated to the wish list.

Overall its a vast improvement over the previous release as far as the iPad is concerned but if the functionality could simply be added to the Google Maps application, standard on the iPad, the more streamlined product would likely be better utilized.

Update:

Check out my video review on Youtube:

The Geography Blog

Apparently my love of maps is not shared by many. Niche shops and niche bloggers are out there but with few exceptions one cannot mention their affinity for maps without a look of confusion trickling across the face of the listener.

Maps represent tangible places and experiences. When I was a kid I would look for simple geographic features, like the curving of a coastline or the bending of a road and try to find that feature on a map. I thought about the technology and thought that must go into map making and how refined maps had become compared to their mid-millennium counterparts. I was also a strange kid :)

Now I spend a good portion of my life making maps. For the most part they are simple with a narrow and somewhat boring purpose but I'm hoping to change that. Geography, maps and imagery is my true passion. It's a way to make sense and capture moments in an ever changing and beautiful landscape.

Geography lets us keep our physical place on this planet and in the universe in perspective. It allows us to relate to each other in a multitude of geospatial and cultural ways. It makes us human.

On this blog, I'll run the gamut from google earth to maps, general geography and did you knows, how to's and new technology. I hope you enjoy it as much as I like experiencing it!

Let's get started!