It seems only fitting to make a post on my woefully quiet blog about an article in which I made a pull quote about wanting to be a blogger. 😉
Taking a break from making ALL the candy for Tales of the Cocktail to share a great article about “50 Best Bars Chasers” that talks about my data project! After spending many, many, MANY hours on compiling the data into something I found useful, it’s really cool to know someone else found it useful as well.
Keeping count is one thing, but developing a platform to showcase a more sweeping set of data is another. Kate Mikkelson turned her work analyzing data sets in Excel and her hobby of visiting bars into a personal bar-logging spreadsheet, and then morphed that into the publicly accessible World’s 50 Best Tracker. The comprehensive spreadsheet has more than 350 individual bars, listing how many times they’ve been on the list and their average rank, and tracking each bar’s year-by-year placement, indicating if they’ve been moving up or down the list. She also records if and when she’s visited them.
“The longer I kept up with the log, the more interesting the data became and the more useful it became when people started asking me for recommendations,” Mikkelson says. “I had dreams of being the next big cocktail or travel blogger but realized it was just more fun to continue it casually.”
Jake Eman for VinePair
Head over to VinePair for the whole article