Monday, July 10, 2017

Tag Your Town


When visiting a town or city for the first time it can be difficult to know which parts are hip, touristy or boring. Hoodmaps wants to solve this problem with its crowdsourced city maps which have been annotated and labeled by locals.

Hoodmaps has two main ways to show you what the locals think about different parts of a city. One way is by coloring the map by its dominant characteristic. Different colors are used to paint neighborhood as being either Uni, Hipsters, Tourists, Rich, Suits or Normies. The color that you see is the dominant color from all the user inputs. Users can also provide more individual assessments of individual locations by adding a custom label to the map. For example, in LA users have tagged locations as 'gay, hookup area' and 'upper class white folk'.

At the moment Hoodmaps is very difficult to search. Links to only six cities around the world are actually provided on the map. I've found that adding a city or town name to the URL works for some locations, e.g. https://hoodmaps.com/chicago or https://hoodmaps.com/sydney.

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