Friends Near and Far
The map above and the map to the right of this column shw the locations of many of the people who have read this blog in the past month. It is a cool little gadget called ClustrMaps that does an on-the-fly GeoCode of the IP addresses of people who click on my blog. I find this interesting because I'm a map geek by trade. While you can read the names of the places people have visited from using another gadget called StatCounter , it's another thing to actually see the locations on a map. That is what makes ClusterMaps so cool. For that matter, that is what makes GIS so cool. It is putting a map to the data. If you think about it, somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% of all data has a mapping component to it. Does the data have an address or location? It probably does. Where does crime happen? Where are the areas of poverty? Who voted for who? Where is a good place to eat? Where are the places to avoid eating? Where does my cell phone go dead? The list goes on and on. My bl...