Bram Dov Abramson wrote:
If you prefer to construct your own, you'll probably want to do something attainable. An interesting approach might be to combine DNS lookups with Web link analysis. In other words, something like:
1) come up with a list of cities you want to test for;
2) find some set of Web sites for each of those cities, for example by looking up the registered addresses for the "top x" Web sites according to Nielsen//NetRatings or ComScore or Alexa or whoever else you judge least bad;
3) tabulate city-to-city links between these Web sites.
That sounds pretty familiar. I did this--in a very limited way--for several "global cities" about six years ago. Here's the paper: http://alex.halavais.net/research/99-informational_city.pdf There's a pretty visualization of the network in the 14th slide in here (fair warning, the file is ~1.4 Mb): http://alex.halavais.net/news/archives/nerdi.pdf I don't want to discourage anyone, but I think George Barnett, my colleague here at SUNY Buffalo, has the right idea in making the best of already available (if expensive) data sets. Gathering the data is definitely NOT half the fun :). I'm working now, along with one of my students (Jia Lin) to do a much more extensive analysis of cities in the US. Hopefully we'll have some preliminary results shortly. Alex