If you were to look at where people in CMU’s MHCI program came from, you’d see heavy concentration of students in the northeastern and western United States. In fact, I can count the number of people from the South and Midwest on one hand (well, if I had a hand with six fingers that is, but who’s counting?).

As such I thought it was necessary to talk up Omaha a little bit and prove that its just as good of a city as any other city out there. Omaha has a population of about 801,000 people, which puts it at about 1/3 the size of Pittsburgh population-wise. Admittedly, we don’t have a major league baseball team or pro football team in Nebraska, but we do have the College World Series, which is pretty sexy. Omaha is also home to the Henry Doorly Zoo which is very cool.

Speaking of the College World Series, if you’ve been following it on ESPN, you might have caught an ad showcasing Omaha that was done by Zaiss & Co. While I can’t find the spot anywhere, a local news station covered the advertising campaign.

This is all part of a push by the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce to up the hype about Omaha (… hey, it is too hype worthy!). They’ve created a website at www.ososurprising.com. I encourage you to check it out if you want to learn more about Omaha.

…What’s with that domain name anyway?. Cognitive Psychology fact: when we see a word that seems to be misspelled, our brain shifts letters around to help it make sense. There is an essay floating around out there with a bunch of misspelled words that tries to show this phenomenon empirically. So I suppose it’s no surprise that every time I look at that domain name, I wonder why Omaha is being promoted on a website about OSU uprisings. Oh well, I guess you can’t win them all. Did I tell you about the zoo?