We attempted to quantify 'coolness' for the 65 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas and Metropolitan Divisions (areas that include cities and their surrounding suburbs as defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget) based on seven data points we weighted evenly.
The index is proportionally weighted based on foreign-exchange trading volume data from the Bank for International Settlements' triennial central-bank survey on global foreign-exchange market activity.
You can be forgiven for thinking that Facebook does all of its product innovation through Big Data, analyzing the activities of its billion users and coming up with a nicely wrapped solution based on a weighted majority of crowd preferences.