Is there a geographical pattern to the top rep holders?

Question

Someone asked today about the best time to ask a question (a question that has come up before) and it got me thinking that if there is a best time, then there is probably a particular geographical region or set of regions that provides more answers than others. I would assume this is most likely North America due to the companies that rule most people's lives in at least the SO and SF domains, like Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple, but are there any stats that could be used to analyse this?

I think it would be interesting to see the patterns as those in high activity regions would face more competition in answering questions than those in low activity regions, or more importantly, time zones. It could give a whole new insight into some of the top rep holders.

As a corollary, the times of day that people answer and ask questions might also be useful on some level.

Answer 1

You could easily just break it down into the primary economic hubs of the IT world:

• East Coast USA
• West Coast USA
• United Kingdom
• Western Europe
• Australia

The Top 7 on SO are as follows:

1. UK
2. UK
3. Iowa, USA
4. Washington, USA
5. Australia
6. New Zealand
7. New York

I am sure someone with more time and perhaps usage of the data dumps could provide a greater breakdown of the data, but just based on Jon and Marc alone, the UK is pretty dominant at the top.

Edit:

After some more counting here are some geographic counts (All Users >= 20,000 rep):

• Unknown (15)
• Western Europe (13)
• Eastern USA (9)
• United Kingdom (9)
• Western USA (9)
• Australia/New Zealand (6)
• Midwest USA (5)
• Canada (1)
• Central America (1)
• Russia (1)

Note: Many of the Unknowns are simply listed as "USA" which combined with the fact that the USA is divided into three regions can skew the results significantly. If the United States was combined into a single entity, it would vastly outperform the other regions in terms of users over 20,000 reputation (currently 69 users in total meet this threshold).

Further Note: Some of the American regions are a bit off, but if you break them down too far you start to make the results a bit more dirty.

New Edit: Combining the regions of the United States into a single entity leaves us with:

• United States (32)
• Western Europe (13)
• United Kingdom (9)
• Australia / New Zealand (6)
• Unknown (6)
• Canada (1)
• Central America (1)
• Russia (1)

Answer 2

Population stats from Wikipedia, User stats from about 17:00 UTC:

Order of table is by first appearance

Clearly New Zealand is the place to be, this is without counting Chris Jester-Young in their total (expat Kiwi living in US)

Key Pop     Agg.    20K users   users/M Agg Rep/M
UK  61.6    392.2   10          0.16    6.37
US  304.1   1002    32          0.11    3.30
AU  21.0    145.6   4           0.19    6.93
NZ  4.2     80.9    2           0.48    19.38
DE  82.1    208.8   6           0.07    2.54
FR  65.1    68.4    2           0.03    1.05
GU  14.0    40.9    1           0.07    2.92
DK  5.5 35.8        1           0.18    6.49
CA  33.8    33.5    1           0.03    0.99
RU  142.0   31.6    1           0.01    0.22
N   4.8 28.6        1           0.21    5.91
SW  9.3 45.7        2           0.22    4.93
CH  7.7 23.3        1           0.13    3.01
N/A 176.1           5

Key Country
UK  UK
US  USA
AU  Australia
NZ  New Zealand
DE  Germany
FR  France
GU  Guatemala
DK  Denmark
CA  Canada
RU  Russia
N   Norway
SW  Sweden
CH  Switerland