Waffle House locations visualized on Google Earth

Here’s an interesting use of Google Earth, that could apply to virtually any business with a variety of locations. Nik Freeman wanted to find a way to display the density of Waffle House restaurant locations across the United States, so he put together a visual display of them. He had intended to simply use it as a way to play with 3D in Google Earth, but the big spike in Atlanta was interesting enough that he wanted to share the image.

Some of Nik’s notes on the “quads” that display the data:

• The quads are continuous across the entire USA. There are no gaps, so every Waffle House location falls within one quad.
• Quad boundaries are static. They will not have changed if I update the data.
• Quads are named for the area they cover, making it easy to discuss particular locations.
• At approximately 2392 square miles each, quads are a nice “bucket” size for tabulating this kind of location data meaningfully.

It’s a great way to show this kind of data. You can read more over on his “Maps by Nik blog“.

( via Huffington Post)