Dopplr Raumzeitgeist 2007: Where we went last year
February 1st, 2008So some people will probably have heard of Dopplr. It’s a online community based around travelling and encouraging meetings while travelling. And according to the MediaGuaridan it is one of several media sensations to watch in 2008“…
Today, they published a Raumzeitgeist (musing on Google’s Zeitgeist) which is a — rather basic — analysis of collected travel data. Most visually striking is of course their map of where the Dopplr community went:
Unfortunately we don’t know much about the data and in fact once you think about the map it’s also a bit lacking in information content:
- what is mapped?
- is it destinations or destinations and origins (probably the difference is not significant)
- there’s no data about the all important numbers: e.g. how popular was a destination (could we vary the brightness of the plotted circles to show popularity?)
Also interesting is their graph of travel distance vs. frequency. I’d imagine that short journeys will not be recorded as much as long (expensive and/or significant) travels. So again the data is rather suspicious. But nevertheless, it is quite intriguing that there’s a dip in frequency for travels around 5-8000 miles (how dare they use imperial measurements!) - does that correlate with landing in the middle of a large ocean?