I am attending Mashup University today, but it is only a coincidence that today's cool site is itself a mashup!
Top City Books combines ECS data, Google Maps, and Yahoo Geocoding to display the top books sold in cities around the world. Geocoding refers to the process of turning a full or partial street address into a latitude and longitude.
As you can see from the image at right, I selected Seattle on the map and zoomed in a bit. According to the site, the top selling book in Seattle is Sherrilynn Kenyon's Dark Side of the Moon. By some cosmic coincidence, the TV here in the break room at Mashup University is showing Roger Waters and Pink Floyd playing some classic tracks from the album of the same name.
The site also allows the search to be refined by category, so that I could choose to see the top selling literature, arts, history, travel, cooking, entertainment, or business books sold in a particular city.
Update: There seems to be some disagreement about what books are actually shown -- most popular in a city or most popular about a city. I have asked the author for more information and will update this post as soon as I know more.
-- Jeff;
I don't think this is actually displaying the top selling books in a particular city. Instead, I think it is displaying the top selling books "about" a particular city. Unless I missed it, I don't believe ECS yields any data about the top selling books by city.
Posted by: Paul | July 10, 2006 at 11:20 PM
I think Paul is right. Those titles seem to be quite suspiciously ABOUT the cities, although that could be an indicator of popularity too, I suppose...
Posted by: David Dodd | July 11, 2006 at 10:50 AM
I think Paul (above) is correct. Amazon already exposes top items and unique items purchased by groups of customers in a feature called Purchase Circles.
For instance, here are the results for Seattle:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/browse-communities/-/223712/book/st/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/browse-communities/-/223712/book/uq/
Posted by: Anonymous | July 11, 2006 at 01:05 PM
Hi. I'm the creator of the site. You're right in that it displays books more "about" a city than "in" a city. In general, it finds the top books about a city by using Amazon PowerSearch (available via AWS). I found this does a pretty good job of getting a good list of books that somehow relate in a significant way to a specific city.
Posted by: Tony | July 11, 2006 at 09:15 PM