General News > Everything happens somewhere…
December 16, 2011
The reason geography matters is because everything happens somewhere. That might sound overwhelmingly obvious but what we mean is that there is a geographic aspect to every news item, every need for a public service and every sales message. In short, for those of us who like poking our noses into other people’s business, geography is the perfect career…
But events don’t just happen randomly across the earth’s surface… We can see definite geographical patterns to them. A Swiss-American geographer called Waldo Tobler came up with the first law of geography: everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. A recent analysis of the Wikipedia database across 22 languages showed that this relationship holds.
Widespread research suggests 80% of people’s income is spent within ten miles of their home so local marketing is clearly important. We have been using our knowledge of local markets for many years to help plan local press, radio, cinema and outdoor advertising as well as helping retailers and direct marketing companies plan retail locations and get more customers… The same techniques can also be used to improve the delivery of public services.
In his first day in office president Obama setup the www.data.gov site, this now has nearly 400,000 datasets (the UK equivalent www.data.gov.uk has 5,400 datasets). But, the information that people are most likely to think is most relevant to them is information about what is near them. This means that these sites need to be geographically searchable and you need data to be able to map results. Data, in it’s raw form, can then be downloaded to be integrated into apps.
Speaking of apps, here are some that we built…
Posted by Simon Perry, Commercial Director at Beacon Dodsworth.
Image taken from The Newspaper Society’s ‘Life is local campaign’
