I looked at the facebook network for La Crosse, WI, my hometown and was impressed that there are 12,856 people on this network alone. People on facebook can belong to only one regional network at a time, so its likely that most of these users actually live in the La Crosse metro region. The city of La Crosse has a population of 51,818 and the metro region has a population of 126,838.

Surrounding cities, like Onalaska, WI don’t have their own facebook network, so people living in these cities are no doubt in the La Crosse network. Regardless, this means that 10% of the population of Metro La Crosse is on facebook.

La Crosse is not extemely tech savvy, but 10% is much higher than the New Orleans, LA facebook score. With 42,789 facebook users in the New Orleans network out of an estimated 1.2 million metro New Orleans population, New Orleans facebook score is a 3.8%.

San Francisco (city, not metro area) scores 15.4% (114,792 users of 744,041 population) and New York is 5.1% facebooked (425,963 users with 8,214,426 population).

It would be an interesting mashup to take facebook network membership numbers, us census data and put them on google maps.

Maybe for some people who don’t know the midwest as well as I do the google analytics visitor overlay map looks fine. However, the shape of my home state, Wisconsin, is certainly distorted and Michigan is almost unrecognizable. This overlay uses the states boundaries that extend over water. For most states that does not affect the overall shape very much but for the upper midwest it makes a big difference.

For reference, heres a google map of the same area.

I recently made a post about how many open source or free applications I am currently using after a reformat of my laptop. I noticed that it was getting a lot of traffic from the google search “open source dumeter“. The same search revealed NetMeter. It is a freeware program that seems to have all of the features (at least the ones I use) of dumeter. I’ve updated my software list to reflect this new find.

For one of my clients I regularly deal with posting for sale and for rent listings on craigslist to test out formatting issues. Today, after I submitted one post, I got the standard post confirmation along with:

Paid to craigslist 2007-09-27 — paymentID

real estate for sale Total to be charged 0.00

Is craigslist setting up the infrastructure to charge fees for brokered real estate listings like they have in New York? That would be interesting.

Update 9/29 - I’ve also gotten this response from posting rental listings.

I just got the wordbook plugin for wordpress. It should post my blog posts from bnee.com automatically to facebook. This combines two of my online presences. I also got the Twitter Widget for wordpress which shows my most recent twits on this blog. Facebook also recieves my most recent twits and posts them into my facebook feed. I can also email photos directly from my phone to facebook.

I’d like to be able to show my facebook photos on my blog and have my facebook status posted to twitter. I also use dodgeball a fair amount to let people know where I am at. I’m not sure this would be useful to post anywhere else, but it would be cool if I could do so. Overall, it looks like more things are getting integrated, which is a good thing. Techcunch is suggesting that google will help facilitate this integration by opening up a lot of their services via API starting Nov 5. I think that will be interesting.

Not wanting to be the last of my friends to cancel their myspace accounts, I pulled the plug today. (Preston did it the day before, but hasn’t written about it yet). I realized that I rarely logged in, most of the messages I got were spam and not very many of my friends were on myspace. Most of the people who were my friends on myspace were also on facebook and were much more active.

Myspace is difficult to navigate, full of irrelevant ads and lacks most of the features of facebook. It won’t be something I miss.

After a non-catastrophic hard drive failure on my laptop, I got to do a clean install of Windows XP. This made me realize how many programs I now use that are open source or freeware. Not too many years ago, a reformat for me meant countless crackz & updating software meant using kazaa to find the latest warez. Now nearly all software I use is open source or free and generally superior to its commercial counterpart.

• 7-zip - This program will handle nearly any type of compressed file (with the notable exception of .ace). Its pretty solid and supports drag and drop. - Replaces WinZip & WinRar
• Daemon Tools - Daemon tools is a CD emulator, needed if you want to mount CD or DVD images. This download is freeware, but it comes bundled with a spywareish toolbar which can be deselected from the install. - Replaces Alcohol 120%
• Filezilla - This is a great FTP program. It keeps getting better with every new release. - Replaces lots of less fun FTP applications
• WinSCP - I also use this for file transfers, mainly because it can untar/gz a file. I know thats lame.
• PuTTY - a telnet/ssh client

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