Hipster avoidance: A 'how to' guide.

By ELISSA RATLIFF

Curse those skinny-jean-wearing, vintage-novel-reading (please, a Kindle is far too mainstream) and soy-chai-latte-sipping hipsters for finding (well, inventing) all the cool spots to hang and taking all the window seats.

These days, inner-city cafes, bookstores and parks are always invaded with cool dudes riding bikes/picnicking/reading/listening to Angus Stone/eating some sort of gourmet concoction that is made to look 100% better when it’s Instagrammed.

Do you want to hear the good news?

Now there is an app to help you avoid (or follow) all of that.

Travel user review website Yelp has launched a site called “Worldmap” which reveals heat maps of 14 major cities including Chicago, Paris and Los Angeles based on keywords that feature in their review site.

Basically, Worldmap pulls in all the reviews of bars, cafes restaurants and businesses from its main site by using keywords such as ‘cheap’ and ‘pasta’ which then produces a heat map to give people visual representations of popular spots.

And one of the most popular keywords? Hipster.

Look, I’ll admit it. I am one of those hipsters – or as I like to call myself, a wipster (wannabe hipster). BUT I do find it hard to avoid the scene when I want to revert to my mainstream ways.

Where I live in inner-city Sydney, hipsters prowl the streets with their books and record players in tow, looking like they have just dropped in from 1960s San Francisco.

If life had a soundtrack, hipsters would constantly have Triple J-meets-Woodstock music following them.

Being a wipster can be hard work. Because sometimes I want to sit in a cafe with my iPad wearing Witchery and listening to Robin Thicke – but when you only know the hipster hangs of Glebe, it’s a very hard thing to do. So much so that it makes me walk into the constant disco that is Supre just to cleanse myself of the hipster vibe.

But now I don’t have to.

Although worldmap hasn’t yet launched in Australia, I’m thinking it will be useful for those travelling and wanting to escape the hipster scenes, with other options including posh, cheap and tourist.

For example if you look at the image of New York, places such as Williamsborough, Brooklyn and the East Village pop up as highly hipster-ized zones. And when it does launch in Australia, we can only guess that Sydney’s Newtown and Surry Hills and Melbourne’s Brunswick and Richmond will feature heavily on the heat map.

What would you choose to avoid if you had the app?