Felafel Land
Last week there was a bit of a brouhaha when Eddie McGuire referred to western Sydney as “the land of the felafel” on his radio show. (My personal feeling is that it was probably only 25% racism and 75% Eddie-being-a-dickhead, but whatev.) Anyway, the Snook is going to the apps4nsw “Hack Day” event tomorrow, where developers from around Sydney will spent 10 hours mashing up government data in new and interesting ways. As practice, he decided yesterday to test Eddie’s hypothesis. He pulled restaurant data from TrueLocal to create a heat map of the kebab shops in Sydney.
Some interesting results there. Plenty of felafel available in the CBD, but once you go over the Harbour Bridge, you’re in a veritable felafel desert.
Incidentally, if you have any inspiration for an app idea for the Snook, leave a comment or drop me an email. He’s even dabbling in iPhone development too…
JulieK
February 18, 2011 — 10:14 am
There’s a kebab shop in West Ryde (just down the road from me, creatively named “Abrakebabra”), and at least one in Macquarie Centre which aren’t showing up, so you might find that there are shops over here, they’re just not online. Very interesting results though, and I’d agree with your assessment of Eddie’s statement.
Kris
February 18, 2011 — 10:27 am
I think he only took the first hundred or so results as a representative sample. I also debated with him the methodology of determining felafel shops; I believe he search for “kebab” in the name rather than relying on a specific cuisine. Still, kinda neat for a quick-and-dirty little mash-up…
The Snook
February 18, 2011 — 10:28 am
Two caveats here:
1. It’s searching for the word “kebab” in the business name.
2. I used a free version of the heat map software that is limited to 100 locations, whereas there were 168 in the TrueLocal result set. There could be bias introduced by me discarding the last 68 results, rather than 68 random results.
Kris
February 18, 2011 — 10:38 am
What criteria does it use to return the results? Is it just relevance, or distanced based on where you did the search from?