Alex Reid

Last week, Jesper Andersen was talking at the Strata Data Conference about how to build a “data narrative” using social media and online information to tell a story about a neighbourhood.

He focused on San Francisco’s Haight Street and with the public information from government open data, mapping data, real estate, rental listings data with data from social services like Foursquare, Yelp and Instagram.

He looked at the safety element by finding the crime statistics from DataSF.org, and looked at an analysis of Tweets and found that, by distribution, people were more negative on the lower half of Haight. He was also able to see what people found interesting on Haight by mapping pictures from Instagram to the street as well to offer a creative Google Street View.

Story of Haight

It’s not the next Google Street View but it does offer hope inspiration to mobile application developers to use open data and social media data to tell a story.

The most interesting thing I enjoy about Okcupid is that they compile interesting statistics of their users – and release them to the public.

Last April, they blogged “10 Charts About Sex“.

I’ll warn you, it’s rather raunchy information.

Women who don’t like exercise are twice as likely to have a problem reaching an orgasm than those who do exercise. Disturbingly, they found that as men get older, they are more likely to enjoy rough sex while women prefer the opposite as they age; half of those men aged 58 on the dating site like it that way. Vegetarians enjoy giving oral sex more than meat eaters. Twitter users are more likely to masturbate.