About the Author:  Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users. Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author

The on line and off line media have been having a bit of a field day with Miss South Carolina’s answer to a question about the lack of geographic literacy in the US. It is hard to do her answer to the question justice, but click on the video below to get the full effect.

Miss Teen USA 2007 – South Carolina answers a question

For a geographic tour of Miss South Carolina’s response check out Billdozer’s entertaining dataset on GeoCommons. If you add it as a layer in MyMaps you can click through and see where “The Iraq” and “The Asian Countries” are located.

The whole episode is pretty hilarious, but I think there is a real opportunity here to offer Miss South Carolina and others challenged by geographic dyslexia a ray of hope. Having gone through undergrad and grad geography classes I’ll be the first to admit they are pretty dry. Even when I was teaching Geography 101 to college freshmen it was a challenge to be more entertaining than the greek gossip page in the university paper. I usually solved this by throwing a nerf ball at the distracted ones, but I am getting off the point.

Back in the day (1997) the best shot we had at multimedia entertainment was the selection of National Geographic videos in the library. There are only so many times you can show the half naked Yanamamo tribe smoking hallucinogenic roots (the green snot side affect is just freaky), and half the kids still have no clue the video is shot in the Amazon rain forest or that it is located in Brasil. There just were not that many tools to make geography exciting, and lets face the Miss South Carolinas of the world are going to need something to distract them from the new hat Lindsay Lohan is wearing in rehab long enough to learn geography.

Fast forward to 2007 and I think we have a much better arsenal of tools to save the geographic dyslexics and prevent and future Miss South Carolinas from being lampooned. The sheer fact that Google Earth has been downloaded 250 million times is testament that you can make geography exciting and interesting. Users are not just passively looking at maps but also actively creating maps with over 1 million created with Microsoft Collections and 50,000 on Platial. Will the growing popularity of the GeoWeb result in decrease in geographic dyslexia? Maybe Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can start a foundation where for only the cost of a cup of coffee you could teach a vapid young teenage American the location of the USA on a map. I am pretty sure Sally Struthers is available. To kick it off we are donating a map to help educate beauty pageant participants on their national geography – behold the number winners of the Miss USA by state.

If you would like to learn more about Miss USA winners by state you can find the dataset on GeoCommons or look at the source on Wikipedia.

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