Dopplr gathers a view of the world’s best places to eat, stay and explore, shaped by the collective intelligence of the world’s most knowledgeable travellers. Designer Matt Jones christened this “the Social Atlas“. Here’s a bit of background on the thinking and the mechanisms that power it.

Early on after we launched the Dopplr private beta to a small crowd of international friends and industry colleagues, I posted a screenshot of some graphs on Flickr. The graphs showed sparklines of real travel patterns to major world cities, and in the description I wrote “I’m so excited about what we’ll be able to do with the dopplr dataset in the future.” Now Dopplr is a well-established site, we’re thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to wield data as a tool to make better services.

There are plenty of great sites out there where you can find subjective reviews and star-ratings of places round the world. We wanted to do something different, building lists of the best places ranked by everything that we know about the traveller. Because of our existing community, we already know all sorts of things about our travellers’ habits – for example, we know who visits New York most often, and we know who lives in Europe. These “opinionated lists” would tell us things like where Europeans eat in Tokyo, or where frequent visitors to New York stay compared to people visiting for the first time.

Taking into account these sort of factors, we can build aggregated views based on the wisdom of particular crowds. It can be interesting to see “people who visit X also go to Y” statements, but we also have a global view:

The Shepherdess is a cafe in East London that’s popular with internet startups from the local area (us included). From the recommendation above we can see that these people are just as selective when they travel, visiting high-end coffee roasters and exclusive ice-cream bars when in San Francisco.

Discovering a city starting with places you already know is a great way to improve your local knowledge, but what if you’re new to a city? The Social Atlas has another mechanism to help sort and sift the combined knowledge of Dopplr travellers. We calculate lists of places that aren’t just ordered by plain popularity, but take into account the travel experience and social interconnectedness of people who visit.

So if you have a strong network of travellers who share trips with you, or you’ve spent a lot of time in a particular city, we take that into account when adding your data to the mix. This results in lists like the following for Austin hotels, which places the Hotel San Jose right at the top. Despite (or perhaps because of) its size and location, it beats large and popular hotels like the Hilton amongst savvy Dopplr travellers, who enjoy its serene atmosphere during the bustle of SXSW.