Nerdytrips - the making of #nerdmap

EDIT: 12 September 2011 - as of a few days ago the new map is live at http://www.nerdydaytrips.com - the design was by @aaronrudd and it was created by @applecado - we love it :)

The only bit that's really out of date in the post below is the reference to Google Realtime. This wonderful service stopped in around June 2011 and is already missed, but Topsy's pretty good. Not the same though.

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Last September Ben Goldacre tweeted of his mild Saturday afternoon boredom and the need to do something non-boring that was local and nerdy, specifically:

"BORED. name a halfdaytrip? i like industrialarchaeology urbanexplorer sub-brit typestuff, dungeness-but-nearer? leaving nw1, car if nec..."
@bengoldacre

Soon after, a whole load of suggestions came in, many of which Ben retweeted and I thought that there was a lot of interesting stuff being suggested that warranted proper curation in case others wanted to go visiting some of these places. Some of them I'd not even heard of. Plenty were in London but there were a few that were further afield.

Google has a facility that will let you harvest tweets sent to a particular account (or using a particular hashtag) in a way that Twitter's own search pages won't, so I used their "Realtime" option to capture all of the tweets sent to @bengoldacre over that period of time. You can see an example of one of those search results for tweets in which Crossness was suggested. On the right hand side is a timeline and you can use it to scroll backwards and forwards collecting the relevant tweets. I think Google's intention is that you can use it to watch real-time tweets happening now but I've been using it to re-find historic ones.

The result of this was "Abandoned Britain - half day nerd trips" - an alphabetic list of the suggestions with the Twitter names of those suggesting, linking to their original tweet.

To cut a long story short @ImaginaryGF and Ben suggested expanding this list to include the rest of Britain, Europe / the world by turning it into a map / archive of nerdy places in which people could add new additions themselves.

This has now happened :-)

The editable map has had over 90,000 views and at time of writing - 5pm on Monday 21 March - has about 370 additions.

We made it as easy as possible for people to contribute:-
1. Add to the nerdytrips / nerdmap map directly
2. Post a suggestion on Twitter and hashtag it with #nerdytrips (and later #nerdmap) so it could be collected via archiving tools like What The Hashtag.
3. Post a comment on Ben's blog

What's next?I'm going to be adding to the map the suggestions that have come in via Ben's blog or the two hashtags and then transferring (gradually!) the entire map onto a master copy for safekeeping. I think I'm going to be quite busy... There are some other plans in the pipeline but I'm concentrating on this for now.

If you want the raw data the four sources are:-

• The map*
• Ben's blog comments
• #nerdytrips archive
• #nerdmap archive
• and for completeness you might like to look at Ben's @ replies between 16 March and now and beyond courtesy of Google Realtime search...

*don't forget to scroll to the bottom and click on page 2 to get the full list, if you want to copy and paste it you'll need to use the print option (or use Jamie's Yahoo Pipes, below).
Some of this data is available as Word (.docx) files which I've stored on my Dropbox.

• All the additions to the Google map (so far)
• All comments on Ben's blog (so far)
• All tweets tagged #nerdytrips (so far)
• All tweets tagged #nerdmap (so far)
• Thanks to someone called JamieB we have a (self-updating I think?) Yahoo Pipes version Meanwhile I've saved what's there so far as a Word document. of the map data. This is hugely helpful as it's MUCH easier to copy and paste stuff from it in the "database" spreadsheet I'm creating (see below).
• A spreadsheet into which I'm putting the bits of data, for later tidy-up - mappa bendi.xlsx

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