If you’re lucky enough to be able to work from anywhere for a living (as some ‘digital nomads’ do), are taking a break to travel, or engaged in other activities that let you explore new places, then a new website which ranks cities based on their ease of working might be worth your attention.
Nomadlist.io is developed by Pieter Levels, who created motivational website Gofuckingdoit.com and is back tackling an issue that aligns with his interest of working from anywhere.
The site itself is simple enough. It uses an up-voting system (like Hacker News, Product Hunt and others) to rank cities based on votes from visitors to the site.
The list view shows basic details about each location — temperature, internet speed and estimated cost of living — and there’s more information if you click on a particular city.
Levels himself has compiled and also crowdsourced via Twitter to show a range of estimated prices and factors that might influence a decision to live in a certain place. This provides a nice starting point for those interested in finding new places of abode, allowing them to go off and do more research.
Right now, Asian cities are proving to be among the most popular destinations — which could be directly related to the fact that Levels has spent a lot of time living in, and blogging about, Southeast Asia.
Thailand’s Chiang Mai (Thailand) is currently top, ahead of Taipei (Taiwan), Davao (Philippines), and Bangkok (Thailand). Sofia (Bulgaria) is Europe’s highest-placed city in fifth.
It will be interesting to see how the rankings change as word of the website gets out and more people from across the world weigh in with votes and opinions. Regardless of the positions, there’s plenty of interesting data for anyone who is considering relocating or traveling across the world — enough to give you a basic idea and motivate further research.
Levels plans to monetize the site by selling guides to each city, which will be aimed at helping anyone get set up and going in any particular place. That part of the project reminds us of World Startup Report, a crowdsourced guide to launching a startup in any country in the world.
Also read: 7 ‘digital nomads’ explain how they live, work and travel anywhere in the world
Headline image via everything possible / Shutterstock
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