World of Water Parks
World of Water Parks
By Paul Ford, co-founder, Postlight
I’m the father to four-year-old twins and sometimes we chill out with YouTube videos. Being four, when they like something they want more of the same—but also a little novelty. This weekend we decided to look at water parks and splash pads. So I found this one in Ohio.
That looks fun! And then I thought, They have water parks everywhere. So I modified my YouTube search to “Water Parks Dubai.” Since Dubai kind of self-consciously has everything.
And soon I found this one in Kabul:
I searched for Iceland, but it turns out there’s a water park named Iceland in the United Arab Emirates, and I couldn’t find any in Iceland itself. The kids got bored, but I kept going, to Istanbul:
And China:
And Japan:
And then I started to write some code. I got a YouTube API key and started to mess around. The goal was to make a search engine where you could search for something and then it would show you the video results from various countries for that search tool. Again, I have four-year-olds so I didn’t get very far. But I did get this far:
It’s interesting to note that some places, like American Samoa, don’t have any YouTube results for “water parks” per se, they just have parks with water in them. And places like Angola don’t produce any YouTube results at all for “water parks.” At first this state of affairs looks like a bug in my approach but I think it might actually be a feature.
As I worked on this project—the Flask/SQLite3/Python combination really is very productive and it’s easy to share your work with others—I realized I was backing into nearly the same idea that Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz came up with for Image Atlas, in 2012. But with a much goofier intent—their tool lets you sort by GDP and translates the words; mine will show my kids videos of wedding dances in Albania. And of course it’s limited to the world as YouTube chooses it show it.
I put up a GitHub repository with where I’m at, if anyone is interested. I may or may not poke around a little more on this project—it’s fun to see the world of water parks, and other searches (fashion show, handguns, hilarious joke, wedding dance) are equally interesting. It’s a good way to see, and share with my kids, how big the world is, and also to see, and share with my kids, that YouTube, as huge as it may seem, is small when compared to the whole world.