10:23AM. Logging off from California. 7:06PM. Logging on from Winnemucca, NV. Had a lovely drive today. I'm exactly where I want to be, in the middle of absolutely nowhere. A little bit of rain coming over the Sierra. It's warm here, in the upper 50s. Had a little trouble connecting via Earthlink, it's a long distance connect so I'll probably wait to upload today's pics. [Scripting News]
Dave's in Winnemucca, NV, "in the middle of nowhere".
If you use the population density metric on the US map, yes Dave, you're really in the middle of nowhere.
But your post struck a chord in me: I'm french, I've lived in California for 3 years, and the number of US cities of which I know the name is pretty low. 50 to 100 I would say. But Winnemucca is one of them, because it's the place where Mona accidentally ends up at her grandmother's Bordello in Armistead Maupin's More Tales of the City (this site for a spoiler).
So using the litterary resonance metric, Winnemucca is a pretty important city in the US, considering the number of people worlwide who have read Maupin's books.
This is not just for teasing: What I'm after in this post is that I can see some useful application of semweb technologies applied to this.
What is needed is:
- Books RDF descriptions describing which places are involved in the book (this could be autogenerated for books for which content is digitized and available)
- web service: geo(placename) gives you lat/long (ICBM coord)
- RDF description about the books I like (I need to check if such a schema already exists)
- FOAF: exists today
- Open source Mapping software: exists, found the excellent article by Owen Densmore, Java Geography for the Smart Mob, Part 1: OpenMap
The application I want to build is something like this. I plan for a trip somewhere and the system could generate these maps:
- absolute litterary density: based on the whole corpus of books.
- friends based litterary density: specify how many foaf degrees I want to hop.
Books are just one example: replace it with everything you are interested in.
This is just a half baked idea and many more meta data are needed to get there: we're still far from Mother Mucca's Blue Moon Lodge !
3:54:49 PM 
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