Friday

Boise? Really?

I hate losing, but I hate losing to Boise even more. But that's just what Las Vegas did, according to a  ranking of the most socially networked cities in the U.S.

The [bogus?] poll, released by Men's Health, claims to have considered Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, Twitter, MySpace, Reddit and Digg usage, along with reported blog and chat room activity when compiling the list. (To do so, they depended heavily on data from NetProspex, Chitika and SimplyMap.)

While you night assume San Francisco would top the poll, the closest major city to Silicon Valley didn't even place within the top five. In fact, SF finished in sixth place—which is respectable, sure, but can someone please explain to be how Atlanta, Denver and Minneapolis out-teched SF?

As I told the friend who sent me a link to the story (via twitter, no less): " I smell another flawed algorithm."

"I thought you would have single-handidly brought Vegas to the top 5," he quipped. Alas, my rampant tweeting was not enough: Boise, Salt Lake, Wilmington and 21 other cities outranked Vegas; we finished in 25th place.

Washington D.C. was awarded first place, which wasn't all that surprising to me. I used to live there, and I recall fondly the abundance of smart, tech-savvy and totally-into-themselves people in that city. (My initial response to learning D.C.: "D.C. won b/c the city is full of narcissists who LOVE checking into 4sq & bragging about what congressman they just talked to."

Atlanta and Denver somehow followed the nation's capital, placing second and third, respectively. Rounding out the list of 100 cities were social network dunces Billings, Detroit, Bakersfild, Lubbock and, in last place, El Paso. Funny: Three of the four most unsavvy cities in terms of social networking were in Texas. Click here to see the full list—not that I think it's all that accurate.

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