I love the website floating sheep, and the infographics that they create. I realize that there are some drawbacks with their approach. One of the drawbacks is that they are searching for English terms. Another drawback is that they rely on people to create placemarks, which may make any conclusions they draw invalid. A third problem is the density of placemarks across the globe. They tackle this subject in their latest post.
We conducted a wildcard search at approximately 260,000 points on the Earth’s surface and collected the total number of placemarks indexed there. As always, a direct observation is preferable to a proxy measure so we’re quite excited by these maps.
One sees that the United States contains the most placemarks (77 million) with almost twice as many as China which has 43 million. The only other countries that also have over ten million placemarks are the usual suspects when it comes to technology use: Germany, Japan, the UK, France and Italy. However, looking at the raw number of placemarks per country only tells part of the story. So, we decided to normalize these data by population and area. In doing so, some interesting patterns emerge.
via floatingsheep.
