Mapping ‘Where I’ve Been’: Hope for America’s Lost One-Fifth?

Travel Blog  •  Julia Ross  •  10.01.07 | 10:43 AM ET

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Call me an optimist, but after recently discovering the mapping application Where I’ve Been, I see a ray of hope for the one-fifth of Americans who can’t find their country on a world map. The interactive map widget—a big hit on Facebook and launched on MySpace earlier this month—lets users color-code countries under “Where I’ve Been,” “Where I’ve Lived” and “Where I Want To Go,” yielding a travel thumbprint, of sorts, that can be loaded onto Web pages or blogs.

While it holds the potential to reinforce a laundry-list approach to travel, I’m hoping the cool factor will give Americans new reason to distinguish Slovakia from Slovenia, or, just as important, Kansas from Utah.

I’m not on Facebook or MySpace, but I coded my own map on the “Where I’ve Been” Web site and was struck by how readily it exposed my East Coast orientation; a huge swath of the U.S., from Texas to Montana, remains sadly untouched:

 

Tags: Geography for Fun and Profit, North America, United States, News and Briefs

Julia Ross is a Washington, DC-based writer and frequent contributor to World Hum. She has lived in China and Taiwan, where she was a Fulbright scholar and Mandarin student. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Time, Christian Science Monitor, Plenty and other publications. Her essay, Six Degrees of Vietnam, was shortlisted for "The Best American Travel Writing 2009."


2 Comments for Mapping ‘Where I’ve Been’: Hope for America’s Lost One-Fifth?

Kango Traveler 10.01.07 | 1:47 PM ET

My Map is missing most of Asia, Working on it but who knows how long that will take. as the world gets smaller we as America need to notice the others outside our borders, i can’t think of a better way of doing this then actually going and seeing another country, culture and experience.

If this face book app helps, well I salute it too.

Michelle 10.01.07 | 5:35 PM ET

These maps are really entertaining, and a good travel resource: I’ve discovered that close friends have been to places I didn’t know they’d visited (or maybe interactive maps are just encouraging everyone to inflate their travels).

I also enjoy the maps that display what percentage of the world the user has visited—it’s kind of enlightening to know that you can feel so well-traveled and still have seen so little. Always more to explore!

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