Map of user locations?

Question

Maybe this has been brought up before and I'm not finding it, but is it just me, or is almost crazy for this site (or dare I say all SE sites) to not have some sort of map of user locations? Not one of those cheezy ones you see on old-skool forums where it maps your IP address and puts a little flashing dot where it thinks you might be, but something based on modern, open API (like determining which one to use wouldn't start a holy war, huh?). Users have the option of adding their location in their profile, and if I remember correctly, it even validates it for you, right? That location could then be used to put them on the map. Thoughts from the SE team on this?

Answer 1

To be honest, you opted in when you placed your location information in the location field in the profile information. I have created some code to scrape the location field (in Python) and it is accessible here. (As a note, feel free to update the code to your hearts content)

I'm pretty sure this data is already acessible from the data dump anyway. You could download that information and make maps to your hearts content (and use other information as well).

Although I wouldn't mind to see a feature like this, I would think users on this site would be able to whip up some pretty cool maps on their own.

Answer 2

Location already exists in the profile, and is cross-referenced using the Yahoo Placefinder API.

We already went through all profiles on the network and auto-mapped the ones we could.

Location in profile was changed without edit or knowing

Assuming you enter something it can parse, there is a hidden field that contains the coordinates. You can of course enter "The Moon", too, it's just a text field.