Where in the world is $MefiMember ?

January 25, 2004 1:29 AM

Think you're well travelled? Make a map of all the countries you have been to. Here's my non-impressive offering.
posted by Orange Goblin (53 comments total)

I like that site: clean and easy to use. Even though I've only been to 8 countries (3%). Pitiful. (My map of U.S. counties visited would be a lot better: about 2100, just over 2/3 of them.)
posted by lelilo at 1:55 AM on January 25, 2004

Very fun indeed, though it feels like virtual bedpost notching. A little hard to see the small places. This month's trip to China sure gave me a boost, even though I was in and out of there in a week. My 6 years in Kuwait, however, are barely visible!
posted by scarabic at 2:23 AM on January 25, 2004

Excellent site, but a zoom would be nice. I made a point of visiting all the little countries (Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Monaco, the Vatican, Luxembourg...) of western Europe and on the map there's still a green gap between France and Spain. What gives?
posted by Paragon at 2:40 AM on January 25, 2004

Interesting. If you select every country, it says you've visited "194 countries (86%)". Is the math wrong, or are there countries missing from the list?
posted by blue mustard at 2:54 AM on January 25, 2004

It also counts Puerto Rico, Greenland, and Antarctica as countries. So I'm not sure it's so accurate in that department.

Still fun though. Not that anyone cares, but here's mine.
posted by boltman at 4:13 AM on January 25, 2004

there's a little dot that looks like it might be hong kong that's red on my map, but i've never been there (or to china). it's there whether i have the uk selected or not.

any idea what it might be?
posted by andrew cooke at 4:13 AM on January 25, 2004

Dude, the code breaks. At least it does on my iBook. It says

'in ' requires character as left operand... and much more

Anybody else having the same problem?

/bugfilter
posted by timyang at 4:26 AM on January 25, 2004

andrew cooke, that's not HK - it's too far north. It looks like Vladivostok - see this map of Korea. It's on my map too.
posted by TimeFactor at 4:41 AM on January 25, 2004

ok, thanks. not been there either... :o)
posted by andrew cooke at 5:11 AM on January 25, 2004

I've got 13% (31 country). See here

My trip to Russia really helped making the map look good.

I would have liked bigger map though. For example, it's impossible to tell apart the countries in Central America.
posted by einarorn at 5:24 AM on January 25, 2004

Nice...I've been searching for a similar site for U.S. states...anyone know of one?
posted by rushmc at 5:46 AM on January 25, 2004

12%
posted by johnny7 at 6:18 AM on January 25, 2004

No one goes to South America?
posted by the fire you left me at 6:49 AM on January 25, 2004

a bunch of my mates just did, and now I regret not joining them, my map looks too green aven at 17% and I could use a bunch of red countries there. I better book a ticket to Brazil. :)
posted by dabitch at 7:07 AM on January 25, 2004

I do, fire.
posted by signal at 7:10 AM on January 25, 2004

11 % including airports. And I thought I was well-travelled!
posted by mert at 7:22 AM on January 25, 2004

13%. Gah, need to work on Africa and Asia
posted by smcniven at 7:29 AM on January 25, 2004

8%, not including airports. Not sure what those red dots in the Pacific are. Thanks, Orange Goblin!
posted by carter at 7:35 AM on January 25, 2004

Here's Mine
posted by geoffaw at 7:58 AM on January 25, 2004

Here's mine.

The red islands are French and British territories, I believe, such as the New Hebrides, French Polynesia and New Caledonia.
posted by dazed_one at 8:38 AM on January 25, 2004

Could the little red dot that timefactor and andrew were wondering about be Macau?
posted by dazed_one at 8:40 AM on January 25, 2004

While we're at it, let's go ahead and compare incomes, too.
posted by drstrangelove at 8:49 AM on January 25, 2004

Nobody's complained yet that the countries are in *crazy* orders?!

Why put 'Spain' in the S part of the alphabet? It's alphabetized like it's 'Espana', but it's written out in English. And then El Salvador is alphabetized under S. And the three columns that read across is just plain wack.

WHAT
THE
FUCK?
ALPHABET
posted by zpousman at 9:02 AM on January 25, 2004

zpousman, I noticed that too, after I spent a couple minutes trying to find Cambodia (filed under "K") and Germany (see "D"). Looks like they translated the list from a language other than English (French? Spanish?), and didn't reorder it.
posted by blue mustard at 9:09 AM on January 25, 2004

What gives? Where is Sri Lanka? What about Hong Kong (should I say China?).
posted by tboz at 9:17 AM on January 25, 2004

14--6% (but my map's all us/canada and europe)...I have to do south america/asia/eastern europe/etc -- cool tho!
posted by amberglow at 9:23 AM on January 25, 2004

dazed_one, nope, Macau is very near Hong Kong in SE China. The red dot is north of Korea, i.e. in Russia. I still say Vladivostok. Or just a bug. Or a communist plot.
posted by TimeFactor at 9:40 AM on January 25, 2004

Seems to me that if they include Bermuda as a whole country, they oughta include the Cayman Islands as one too. They have their own money and everything, and I've been there. For like a whopping 9 hours, but hey.

Told me 9 countries. Then I looked at the map and realized that I'd forgotten to include the US; oops. So make it 10.

And I think that living somewhere vaguely-involuntarily for a while should count for more, so I want my 8 years as an AF brat in Germany to count double. Or I shall hold my breath.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:47 AM on January 25, 2004

Fun site, thanks very much.

As for the alphabetic thing :-
... after I spent a couple minutes trying to find Cambodia (filed under "K") and Germany (see "D"). Looks like they translated the list from a language other than English (French? Spanish?), and didn't reorder it.

I believe that the order is the same as the Internet country code for each country (e.g. .de for Germany, .kh for Cambodia, .hr for Croatia, .ae for the United Arab Emirates, .za for South Africa etc.). Take a look at the URL for each map, which is really just a string of country codes. (Oh, and tboz :- Sri Lanka is .lk).

Here's mine.
posted by plep at 10:29 AM on January 25, 2004

"Dude, the code breaks. At least it does on my iBook. It says

'in ' requires character as left operand... and much more

Anybody else having the same problem?"

Yeah, it was broken for me, too, because I have been to a grand total of 1 country (although I've been close enough to Canada and Mexico to smell their stenches). Add a second country and it works just fine. I chose Portugal, even though I'm still not convinced it actually exists.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 10:52 AM on January 25, 2004

I want hong kong to be a separate entity, cuz checking 'china' seems like cheating.
posted by sid at 11:13 AM on January 25, 2004

Cute link. Here's mine.

"It also counts Puerto Rico, Greenland, and Antarctica as countries. So I'm not sure it's so accurate in that department. "

Shoot, I always thought Greenland was a country. Next, you'll tell me it's not green.

Anyone been to all 7 continents? Looks like smcniven is the most widely traveled so far, you jet-setter, you. But, I wait to see Miguel's.
posted by superchris at 11:15 AM on January 25, 2004

I believe the list is alphabetized by ISO country codes - e.g. Morocco (MA) is sorted at the beginning of the M's, Spain (ES) is in the E's. Classic database-geek mistake...

(Here's my measly 7%)
posted by adamsc at 12:09 PM on January 25, 2004

Nice...I've been searching for a similar site for U.S. states...anyone know of one?

I mentioned U.S. counties for the same reason, rush, hoping someone would tell me that, and a nice guy from Canada named David (who can't get into the MeFi club, so he had to email me privately) told me about this site. I just got there, but it looks pretty interesting.

A related site, The Extra Miler Club, is for the 'nuts' who want to visit all 3100+ counties before they die.
posted by lelilo at 12:14 PM on January 25, 2004

Anyone been to all 7 continents? Looks like smcniven is the most widely traveled so far, you jet-setter, you.

Funny you should ask -- my first trip to Antarctica was last month and that completed the continent thing for me.

The map didn't work for me, but it said I'd visited 68% of the countries. Given what blue mustard discovered about the math, I'm not sure what that means since I didn't go back and count them.
posted by joaquim at 1:06 PM on January 25, 2004

While we're at it, let's go ahead and compare incomes, too.

That's lame. In my travels around the USA last summer I spent less money than I would have sitting at home watching TV. International travel can be done even cheaper.
posted by stbalbach at 1:21 PM on January 25, 2004

Um, yeah. Click on Orange Goblin's first link, and scroll down. Now click on "Visited States."

Here's my U.S. map, f'rinstance.
posted by yhbc at 1:29 PM on January 25, 2004

Whoops. I forgot to insert the

Nice...I've been searching for a similar site for U.S. states...anyone know of one?

at the top of that last comment there.
posted by yhbc at 1:30 PM on January 25, 2004

Anyone been to all 7 continents? Looks like smcniven is the most widely traveled so far, you jet-setter, you. But, I wait to see Miguel's.

I dont think this was built as a contest yet its funny to see people will use anything that way.

If it was, it would make more sense to award more 'points' for obscure countries rather than have everything be equal. Likewise, if you've been to both Moscow (on the far west near europe) and Vladivstok (on the far east near japan) you still only get 1 meager point - better to just remember to dip your foot into luxembourg next time you're in europe.
posted by vacapinta at 1:30 PM on January 25, 2004

Anyone been to all 7 continents? Looks like smcniven is the most widely traveled so far, you jet-setter, you. But, I wait to see Miguel's.

I dont think this was built as a contest yet its funny to see people will use anything that way.


Well I don't think I was using it that way but whatever. Actually, I was sure that the Mefi crowd would be more traveled than I. And I must admit that many of those countries were visited on business and I often didn't get much (or any) time to sightsee.
posted by smcniven at 2:13 PM on January 25, 2004

Adventures in real-world (and real-time) MetaFiltering! Ever since my last comment, I've been enjoying a very pleasant email exchange with Giorgio, from the World66 staff. I first thought about paraphrasing his comments, but now I think a straight copy-and-paste will do just fine, with a little cleaning up and re-ordering; my questions and/or comments are in italics, and Giorgio's are in regular type:

Hi, If you are interested in a mapping tool for US States you can find it here:
http://www.world66.com/myworld66/visitedStates
P.S. I found your comment on Metafilter :-)

Giorgio Baresi (World66 Staff)

You are speedy, Giorgio, I just made that comment. However, I was pointing out that the tool is in fact there on the link in the MetaFilter thread.

I've been checking all the comments on Metafilter for a couple of hours! I think the comments you are posting there are really interesting for us to improve our tools!

Maybe you can clear up a question or two that have come up in the discussion of the site - did you (or whoever at World66) use an alphabetized list of countries and states in a language other than English, and then translate the list into English? It appears that the list of countries, in particular, is not alphabetized properly in English as a result.

No, countries are ordered according to their international "code": if you check United Arab Emirates are listed between Andorra and Afghanistan because their code is AE. I absolutely know this isn't a good way to order countries and I already told this to the creator of the tool (Douwe Osinga)... you know, I'm just a webdesigner and don't know much about programming stuff! However tomorrow morning we will at work again and I think we'll fix all those problems!

Also, "Massachusetts" is misspelled in the list of states, which also makes me think the site may have originally been done in a language other than English

I corrected it. Now it should be fine. Thanks! (P.s. the website is only in English and has never been translated from any other languages. Some spelling errors are due to the fact that none of us here is English Speaking as his mother tongue)

Please let me know if you can, and I will pass on your comments to the folks on MetaFilter!

Thanks... I've been trying to register to Metafilter for one year, but simply they don't let me do that!

Giorgio

Thank you, Giorgio!
posted by yhbc at 3:11 PM on January 25, 2004

That's lame. In my travels around the USA last summer I spent less money than I would have sitting at home watching TV. International travel can be done even cheaper.


That might be true if I weren't in my own business, where the time taken away for travel is more expensive than the actual arrangements.
posted by drstrangelove at 3:58 PM on January 25, 2004

Yeah, I got 5 countries (Canada, US, Iceland, Ireland, and the UK), for a whopping two percent. And Iceland, to be fair, was just an airport.
posted by synecdoche at 7:08 PM on January 25, 2004

Thanks Giorgio! It's a cool tool--how about a world cities map?
posted by amberglow at 7:16 PM on January 25, 2004

And late to the party as always, I'm going with the US state map, seeing as I've never left North America.
Map
Come to think of it, this is the first time I've regreted not driving an extra hour so I could add Arkansas to the list.
posted by cryosis at 8:36 PM on January 25, 2004

Synecdoche: don't leave Iceland at just the airport ... it's a wonderful destination!

For the record, my record is Canada, US, Mexico, Denmark, Iceland, UK.
posted by silusGROK at 10:09 PM on January 25, 2004

I seem to have an inordinate amount of small territories cropping up on the map I made.

Also, What is the %age thing about? I have visited 30 countries and this site reckons that this is "13%".

If it is refering to countries, then this must be wrong as there are not 231 countries in the world. It can't be land mass either, so what is it?
posted by davehat at 1:34 AM on January 26, 2004

If Giorgio is still reading this, then it would be excellent if they could make the map bigger, perhaps with zooming.

Also, if the name of the country could appear on mouse-over, that would be great! But otherwise this is an excellent site!

Oh, and I agree with silusGROK, there's so much to see in Iceland other than that lovely airport, but then again I'm a bit biased.
posted by einarorn at 2:14 AM on January 26, 2004

Also, What is the %age thing about? I have visited 30 countries and this site reckons that this is "13%".

Another note for Giorgio. As davehat notes the calculation is off. They are dividing by 225 or so (depends on rounding) but only offer up 194 countries to select.

This means that even if you selected half the countries in the world (97) you'd only get a 43%
posted by vacapinta at 2:28 AM on January 26, 2004

As far as I can remember, there are only 193 countries in the world. Minor territories of larger states and areas in dispute (eg, Western Sahara) might take the number up to 260 or so, perhaps this is where the figure is coming from, but even then the percentage would be wrong.

As for the 194 selectable countries on the site, Greenland is not a country, neither is Puerto Rico, but East Timor is. This should give you the figure of 193.

Hope this helps. I love the site.
posted by davehat at 3:11 AM on January 26, 2004

I've been to 49 states but the weird software rounds up and says that I've been to 50 states .... or 98% !?
posted by jessamyn at 6:46 AM on January 26, 2004

Pah! You let some Brit beat your state-visiting butt yhbc? ;-)
{I should visit New England one day. All those weenie states should get up the total nicely...}
posted by i_cola at 7:00 AM on January 26, 2004

For serious county-counters (I'm at 539), there's an Access database available at this site which includes not only a database of all U.S. counties, but the 9,332 possible "abutments" between neighboring counties. So for example, if you're on I-95 between New York and Boston, you'll be checking off, among others, the abutment between Fairfield County and New Haven County, Connecticut.

Now that's hardcore.
posted by PrinceValium at 10:53 PM on January 26, 2004