According to charts compiled by website I Know Where Your Cat Lives, California is the most cat-ful state in the nation, and Los Angeles is the second most cat-rich city in the state, following San Diego (??). How did IKWYCL arrive at these numbers? By using images from public photo-sharing sites whose users allow their locations to be pinpointed (e.g., Twitpic, Flickr, Instagram) to create a Google map with adorable images of cats organized according to where the images were taken, down to about 7.8 meters accuracy. Cute and yet kind of terrifying.
After one glance at the Google-mapped cat-scape, some neighborhoods jump out: the Ladera Heights/Inglewood area, Hollywood, and West Hollywood all have triple-digit numbers of cat pics floating around online. Zooming in closer reveals that the cats are fairly spread out, so it's not like there's an unofficial hub of cat hoarders anywhere—at least, not one that's using Instagram.
Users aren't constrained to the US; the map covers the entire world. Hit the "random cat" button and see a cat who had its picture taken in Brazil or the UK.
There is a slight flaw to the approach the map takes, which is just to use all images online tagged with "cat"; sometimes people tag pictures "cat" when they're really just picture of humans who are named Cat, people who are making cat-like gestures, or a haunting painted statuette of a kitten from one of those paint-your-own-pottery places.
· I Know Where Your Cat Lives [Official Site]
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