.>In the vein of keeping it updated, it will be difficult if people move. I'll be moving after I graduate at the end of this year, and the Knoxville entry will be gone.
Send me a message when you move, and I will update your dot.
Would there be a way to get the "location" information people put into their profiles automatically parsed into a Google map like this?
I'm sure there is, but I can't do it. If there are any GIS people here, I bet they have/know of a program that can do it.
Google maps disappointed me in that it doesn't have an option to jitter the data points at all. (but it's free! so....) There are some places that have people right on top of each other (like New York or CA), and you can't tell until you zoom pretty far in on them. I'm sure someone here knows of a better tool, if they'd like to volunteer.
Also...Thank you to whichever mod fixed the link in my post. Much appreciated!
I know of several programs that can query a database in real time (eg, Tableau), but am not aware of any free versions. Given a database of US zipcodes and their coordinates and a database of LW poll responses, I'm sure it would be trivial for me to write a program that makes a list of occupied zipcodes, their locations, and how many people are at each one. Presumably then it would be possible to draw a map or feed the data to Google Maps...I'm not much of a hand at web stuff so I'm not sure about that.
Earlier this month, Metus did a post asking for LW-ers locations. I thought it would even more useful to have this information in visual format, so I created a Google map. You can access it on the website below. Unfortunately, I am terrible at this post-writing interface, so I can't get the image of the map to load onto here. You'll have to click the link to view it.
Original Post: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8sm/where_do_you_live_meetup_planners_want_to_know/
(If you haven't filled out the poll yet, please do it! If more people submit their location info, I'll add them to the map.)
These are only for US locations that had a 5-digit zip-code, or a city name. I may or may not map the other countries. If someone else wants to volunteer, send me a message, and I'll add you as a collaborator to the map, so you can edit.