To all you Geohipsters out there

Have you heard of the Geohipster blog? It’s the self-described place for people who ‘grow their own organic vertices, use gluten-free topology or only geocode by hand, in small batches’. And I give at a big recommendation, put it into your feed reader. And relax, you don’t need to be a fixie aficionado/-a in order to appreciate the Geohipster movement.

Atanas Entchev (of ENTCHEV GIS) and Glenn Letham (of GIS User) keep Geohipster interesting by interviewing industry exponents. So far, I’ve particularly enjoyed the interviews with Andrew Turner (of Esri), Bill Dollins (of Zekiah), Jonah Adkins (of GISi) and Brian Timoney.

Atanas and Glenn collect Geohipster wearing their Geohipster shirts on a map. Obviously, no matter how hip your shirt is, this sampling methodology will only ever give you a very incomplete picture of your fans. Hence I got the idea to geocode and visualise devoted fans followers of Geohipster. I adjusted my SwissGIS map code and produced The Geohipster Map:

All followers of the @GeoHipster account (representing GeoHipster on Twitter) who have a public account and feature geocode-able information in their Twitter profile (in the “location” attribute) are visualised on the Geohipster Map. A geocode-able location attribute either contains a recognisable place name or lat-lon coordinates in WGS1984, separated by either a comma, a semi-colon, a slash or a vertical bar (this one: |) (e.g: “47.51 / 8.54”). If a place name is given, it’s geocoded using the Geonames API and a minor random component of usually a few hundred meters is added to reduce clustering of map markers.

A special case are followers who indicate their location as, for example “everywhere”, “global”, “earth”, “somewhere”, “worldwide”, “unclear” or “Null Island”: I took the freedom to assign their location to the latter. It just seemed fitting for Geohipsters.

If you are a follower of @GeoHipster and have filled in your location field but are not displayed on the map or in an unexpected place, the location is not properly geocodeable by GeoNames. You can test the suitability of your location field’s contents here using the search function (although there is some evidence that there can be differences between the search function and the API).

If you want to be on the map: Simply follow @GeoHipster and let your hipster flag fly. The map will be updated from time to time. Let me know if you have questions.