Simple, yet interesting: search Twitter for a place name, bundle returned tweets in a new stream and watch what’s going on there.
Compared to a pure geographic search, the semantic search returns tweets about that place, instead of tweets located nearby. The content of geotagged tweets isn’t necessarily directly related to the place, as the geographic search results show. A combination of both methods might be useful though.
… (a computational information design researcher) is playing around with geographic information and creates some really interesting things.
First, a totally low budget weather map by simply analyzing and mapping people’s chats about weather on twitter:
and second, some nice map visualizations, all done with processing:
or Twitter is the reason for not filling up this space here with more content recently.
Seriously, when Twitter was released I never would have thought that the 140 character messages will catch my attention. As I used to say LOST is not my thing and now I’m into the 4th season.
Guess I was wrong.
Twitter is fascinating, it’s simple and quick – no title, no abstract, body, trackback, category or comment, basically just a line. It makes you post micro-fragments of your day and read other’s. Mostly unimportant and meaningless, sometimes resulting in short conversations.
It’s not the single message stuffed into 140 characters which draws so much attention. It’s the stream, the ongoing sum of tweets what makes it so interesting.
Good news from Plazes HQ: social features are going to come back to Plazes again. Along with its latest relaunch Plazes started feeling like one of those infamous Twitter clones rather than a location aware social network. The new dashboard and Plazer were primarily answering the question “What are people doing?” than “Where are people?”.
I still believe the Plazes concept – “where are my contacts” and “who is in my neighborhood” – is much more interesting and sustainable than the Twitter hype – “what is the world doing (in one line)”. Twitter is fascinating for, let’s say, about 10 minutes, but after this short initial period it’s getting boring.
Next Tuesday, 1st May, a few local Flickr users will meet up at the May Day happening in Vienna.
Meeting point: 1st May, 9.30am, at Burgtheater (right next to the Tramway station)
The plan:
Everyone interested in photography and curious about odd places like abandoned industrial zones is of course very welcome to join the group.
I’ve set up a Twitter feed where I’ll post our locations during the day, for people who want to drop by at some time or place.
Who says social networks are limited to human beings only?
Thanks to some ingenious Metalab members it’s now possible to add the Metalab door to your friends on twitter and follow its exciting messages. Possibly the first serious twitter application out there.
Well, I didn’t jump on the Twitter bandwagon – the last days my feed reader was quite cluttered with blog posts starting with t and ending in witter – but the twittervision map mashup nicely demonstrates visualization of rapidly changing geotagged content.
As far as I can tell, after having a quick look at the Twitter API, the map solely relies on geocoding services. There is only a <location> element containing place names in the Twitter data stream, no GeoRSS or any other geotagging method has been applied yet.