Is there a Grid Demographics Map?

I've been wondering this question for a long, long time.

I look out on the grid and see approximately one beeellion square meters of land... but it's more than just land.

There are some fairly broad usage categories:

- "residential"
- shop space
- RL business space
- educational
- gaming

Also,

- mainland/private
- dominant language group
- public/restricted access
- PG/Mature/(age verified?)

Things of this nature.

Has anyone ever even *loosely* tried to categorise and map the grid in this way? Perhaps it's an inexact science, but even a map that was "more accurate than not" would be stunningly useful.


* * * * *

Why I care:

I see the grid becoming much more deeply interconnected than it is today, within 2-3 years. In other words - able to move from one grid location to another simply by flying - much of the void filled in.

Sure, there will always be room to move outward to the infinite frontier. But I see the core growing interconnected in spite of that, because people will connect for positive social and economic reasons. It's slow and subtle, but clear: connectivity generally enhances influence and income for those participating.

Thus, bluntly put, I believe some grid coordinates are worth a lot more than others.

Even now. And that difference is getting more and more pronounced each day.

Example: If you are Brazilian, the area around the Brazilian speaking regions is worth more to you than say, an equivalent region halfway across the grid. Every viewing of the grid map is exposure; every connected regional border is additional exposure.

And remember, every single region placed influences *nine* grid coordinates: the eight regions around them. You may have only one region, but its coastal rights cover not 65536m but 589824m - well over 1/2 million square meters.

That's a significant impact - influencing over 10,000 USD of potential private regions (1675 USD * 9) and about 32,000 USD worth of tier annually.

So the reason I care is this: I believe that a modestly accurate grid demographics map would allow for informed financial decisions. For years to come.

Also, I fear there may be need for future policy - if 16m parcel extortion seems bad now... imagine the morally bankrupt taking that to the next, obvious level.

* * * * *

Another question is: would the making of such a demographics map be ethical?

Datamining is somewhat 'accepted' as a practise because it's hard to prevent, but that's a separate question.

Perhaps a Company 'opt in' map might be the ideal, where everyone could color in their own region according to what was going on (we'll presume honest reporting for a moment - yes, I know, foolish notion that!).

Failing proper procedure, a map drawn and editable wikipedia-style might be the easy answer. Far from accurate, but maybe not too far from wrong. Areas like Dreamland or Otherland, IBM, and various college campuses on the grid might be easily updated in minutes based on long-established, stable zoning.

Someone out there surely must have mulled over this sort of thing before - is this reinventing the wheel?

just taking the mainland into account

making an inventory of all the regions, their zoning map and shop names would take ages
by the time your done, half the grid is outdated (if not more) so this data will never be reliable unless done with a couple dozen people

Perhaps one of the groups that holds a 16 sq.m. lot in every sim for data collection purposes would like to weigh in on this.

There would also be a very large category for empty land for sale. I agree with Alicia - esp. on mainland, things change so fast that if the data collection were done manually, the data would be obsolete by the time the project was finished.

The new Search will throw up parcels with objects for sale. (Or it probably will do with some accuracy eventually).
That could be your starter for a map of heavily_commercial v. lightly v. zero/residential sims.
Bots could be sent to check ratios of parcel size to items for sale if needs be.
Some automated word-searching by language on the search results could be helpful in tying down language markets.


Then of course, LL will throttle search because bots are hammering it constantly.
This will inconvenience manual searchers.
It will not inconvenience the bots very much as they will multiply and work in a federated manner.

I've kind of given half of a thought to this and while some real world concepts seem to apply, the fact that virtual spatial proximity is essentially optional some things that you'd expect tend to fall apart. If you were to get the data, looking at it with a geographical information system, looking for trends there's a lot of room for misinterpretation and adjacencies that in the real world just wouldn't exist.

I believe one of the confounding factors is that a replacement or at least complement to spatial relationships exists in our groups lists and landmarks folders. In the real world it's useful and economical to have related uses close to each other in most instances. When one can teleport it's not so important.

Having said that, I'd still love to see more themed multi-sim areas or at least ones that are culturally related. I don't think we need to worry about ghettoization as long as there's still some freedom for self-expression and multi-av ownership within the naturally-forming "provinces" or whatever we end up calling them.

Interesting... interesting.

I suppose another key stat would be 'velocity of land' - the # of times an entire region's worth of land changes hands in say, a year. It would inform deeply with regard to dataset quality.

Some places on the grid, I'd be surprised if they were much different literally a decade from now.

Might sound offbeat, but look at the 'housing' situation on an Ultima Online shard, or land use in ActiveWorlds or even There.com. Some people especially in older regions *really* stay put. The old FIC areas of Sansara (the Old Mainland) are beginning to get that reputation now, I think.

I'd love to have something like a Google App over the latest map of the grid - something that we could toss up there, zoom around, and literally anyone could edit on a region by region basis.

Land use layer: Say residential green, commerce blue, a sort of aqua for 'mixed', orange for educational, red for games, white for RL business, clear for empty - maybe 'browns' for educational mixed use - that kind of thing. Crowdsourced data input - anyone can mod anything; griefing can be reverted wiki-style. Could be as accurate as wikipedia (inexact but useful).

Cultural demographics layer: dominant language spoken in region X.

Other layers: PG/Mature, forum participants, blingtards per sq. m, you name it.

I get the sneaking suspicion that someone good at scripting might be able to create something like this over a weekend, given four large pizzas and a twelve-pack of Code Red.

Am I wrong?

Average going price per sq. meter would be handy also, those older established sims tend to sell for a much higher price when a parcel comes available. Which is why they are ad farm free now.

I guess rather than "drawing" a map, I think of this more as a dynamic data-gathering effort that automatically draws the map. Opt-in, so that sim owners would subscribe to the service, and receive a box with a publicly available script that they can put anywhere on their land. Get the Lindens to do it too, or permit someone to do it for them. The script would automatically gather a well-known set of stats continuously, into a SQL database from which the map can be compiled on demand.
.

There area few things that could be collected from existing flag systems:

Mature vs PG parcels, Land for sale, Parcels that have 'for sale' items in them, parcels marked as age verified only. Parcels with ban lines. Parcels that are push enabled. Parcels that are damage enabled...

The problem is, it changes SO rapidly!

I think the only things that could be flagged like this would have to be flags that the land owner can set, and that are supported by the client/server user interface.

Things like dominant nationality or spoken languages? It could be cool to know, certainly, but almost impossible to determine.

I'd love to see a map that showed clearly where the damage enabled and push enabled areas are (so I can avoid them), and where the access-restricted versus open-access areas are.

OK, all this spatial data analysis talk is getting me hot

Hm.

Come to think of it, having an 'adfarms present' flag or anything like it might be economically damaging to residents.

There would definitely be some ethical considerations, regarding a map like this.


I'm all about blending data - sure, there could prolly be a bot set loose to determine "number of things for sale" and stuff like that.

But one person coloring in a big chunk of Dreamland as residential, say, would be just as valid info in most cases I think.

Maybe we could have both?

How about the very most basic: isn't there an app that can make an overlayable grid map somehow?

Ordinal had this working once: http://ordinalmalaprop.com/caledon/tram/

Maybe something like it could be used, or is this now impossible?