The Geography of porn..

May 14 2006
by Ed

I blogged a few weeks ago about the generally unrecognised potential value of geospatial “attention data”, the information which describes what we are interested in, as manifested by the information we leave behind when we use web-sites.

The BBC today reports on Googles harvesting of its attention data using its new Trends analytic tools.

It appears that Birmingham in the UK is the centre globally for searching for porn on the internet, following by Brisbane, Perth and Sydney and Melbourne – does this say something about Australians? Very bizarrely these major cities are followed by Brentford a suburb of London just a few Km north of Teddington…

I smell something fishy :-) with these findings, but regardless of how this information may have been analysed, I think it still demonstrates the value of this type of data.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

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3 Comments leave one →
2006 May 14
Alex permalink

Probably ‘cos Brentford is the location of several quite major ISP facilities? C&W, BT and I think Pipex have sites there. There’s a similar effect I noticed when Martin Stabe’s blog started tracking user locations, showing that an alarming percentage of them were in Lambeth. Naturally, this was an artefact of the LINX being located in Tookey St SW1..

2006 May 15
Thierry permalink

I guess the value of such stats is in generating attention-grabbing results, rather than true results. Along similar lines my native country is apparently proudly leading the world in per capita alcohol consumption, ahead of the Hungarians and the Irish:

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2877868

Whilst we do enjoy a drink or two, the stats however do not mention that the Luxembourgian tax regime encourages the Belgians, Germans and French to cross the border everyday to stock up on cheap booze. So if you distribute ‘our’ alcohol consumption amongst the neighbouring countries the geostatistical map would end up looking very different.

2006 October 10
swansea geography students permalink

we are second year students studying geography and weve been talking about how cool it would be to have a geography and porn studies joint honours degree, we found this website along the way when looking into it, we have taken these stats into acount and may infact contact some universities in birmingham, brisbane etc. to find out if they’d be interested in having such a joint honours degree,
sincerely swansea geography depatement

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