When I was very young I went a Montessori school here in
Toronto. If you’re not familiar with Montessori education, it’s basically a
very open ended and independent form of learning. Students choose
what they want to do.
Because of this, many have argued that a Montessori
education is actually great training to be an entrepreneur. Instead of being
told what to do, you as a student need to figure it out on your own. See the
parallel? Both Google founders went to Montessori school.
When I was there (< grade 4), my absolute favorite thing
to do was draw maps. I remember them having these large scale maps of the world where you could
physically remove each country so that you could then trace it and create your
own maps. I spent a lot of time doing exactly that.
To this day, I still really love maps. And I remember many
of my friends in architecture school being the same way. So perhaps it comes
with the territory.
In any case, I recently started playing around with a product
called cartoDB. And one of the things you can easily do with it is connect it
to Mailchimp (the service that manages the ATC email newsletter) and anonymously
map the location of each subscriber. I couldn’t resist giving it a try.
Below is what that looks like. Not surprisingly, the highest
concentrations of subscribers to this blog are in Canada and the US.
So here’s a zoomed in version:
I’ve been trying to branch out from talking about Toronto
all the time. And that seems to be working somewhat. But I could still do a better
job of creating more global content. I’ll try harder.