
UPDATE: You can now buy a poster of the Dopplr Raumzeitgeist 2007 from ImageKind.
While we’re busy working on new stuff for 2008, we thought it would be fun to look back at the first year of Dopplr in our inaugural “Raumzeitgeist” round-up.
Zeitgeist of course means “Spirit of the times”. You’re probably familiar with Google’s wonderful ‘zeitgeist’ report they publish annually, reflecting culture in what people were searching for that year.
“Raumzeitgeist” translates literally as “Space Time Spirit” and that’s precisely what we’ve got here. It’s about where we, the users of Dopplr, travelled through space and time on our little planet last year…
In 2007:

Dopplr travellers lived in 172 different countries (4310 cities), and visited 201 different countries (6088 cities).

52% of trips were within the same country. As you might expect, the top ten trips within the same country were all in the USA.

The average Dopplr trip was 5682 miles (each way – so if they were all round-trips the average total travel per trip was double that).
As you can see from the graph below – this average trip length results from the ‘double-hump’ displayed, where there are peaks in the 1000-2000 mile trip range and the longer-haul, 9000-10000 mile range.

The top ten trips were:
- London to Paris
- San Francisco to New York
- Helsinki to London
- London to New York
- San Francisco to Los Angeles
- New York to San Francisco
- Boston to New York
- Los Angeles to San Francisco
- London to Amsterdam
- London to San Francisco
The top ten destination countries were:
- USA
- Great Britain
- Germany
- France
- Spain
- Italy
- Canada
- Netherlands
- Sweden
- Finland
And the image at the very top of this post?
That’s a picture of Earth in 2007 as plotted by Dopplr’s travellers.
When we generated the mapping of it (and many thanks to Aaron for his help in doing so) we were stunned by the coverage – there is perhaps some all-too-predictable density and sparseness but the resemblance to NASA’s image of the earth at night inspired me to create the above graphic, summing up 2007’s Dopplr Raumzeitgeist.
Where next in 2008?
——
P.s…
There’ll be more on the data, how we generated it and your chance to get your hands on it in order to make your own visualisations – in my next blog post.