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City Tweet Meter: Adds Graphs, Dials, London ahead of New York

By Cities Tweets, data mining, london, New York, Tweet-o-Meter, Tweets

Our Tweet-o-Meter which keeps track of tweets per minute within a 30km area of New York, London, Paris, Munich, San Francisco, Barcelona, Oslo, Tokyo, Toronto, Rome, Moscow and Sydney, now features graphs. We are currently running dynamic graphs for each city over the last hour with 24 hour graphs online next week. The results are interesting, London is just ahead of with New York on number of tweets with Oslo, Rome and Sydney in the lower ranks.


Currently in beta, the meter is part of our wider ‘Ask’ tool which will allows anyone to ‘mine’ data from Twitter or carry out a survey of either the world, a continent, a nation, a city or a local area. In short, we think it has notable potential for social science and the analysis of trends and relationships in a variety of areas.

We have run various beta tests on data collection with the main mining process starting next week over a 24 hour period. We aim to collect all tweets with a geo-location tag in the above cities, this is a large amount of data allowing various social, spatial and temporal analysis to be carried out.

The system is under development here at CASA as part of a wider survey tool as part of the NeISS project being coded by Steven Gray in association with Urban Tick, currently carrying out analysis on the data sampled so far.

We are moving it into the ‘real world’ as well with a series of Tweet-o-Meters linked to panel meters sitting on our shelves here in CASA:

Analog Tweet-O-Meter from Benjamin Blundell on Vimeo.


Take a look for yourself – The City Tweet-o-Meter

Bing Streetside: Flickr in 3D Space, 3D Transitions and Notable Potential

By Bing, Flickr, Panorama, panoramic imagery, Street View, streetside

Microsoft have just just rolled out a new application that is currently in a tech preview phase that pulls photos from Flickr®, associates them with Bing Maps Streetside photos and then overlays them by stretching the photo to form fit where in the world it belongs. The new application called Streetside Photos is currently available in Seattle, San Francisco and Vancouver (Canada) to view your Flickr photos in a whole new way. We gave it a spin this morning and captured the video below, it has huge potential to view historic photos and crowd source the latest imagery.

Note how the 3D transitions between scenes and how the photos become part of the panorama:

See the post over on the Microsoft site for full details on Streetside or jump direct to the Streetside Photos application.

Steam Punk Beta Tweet-O-Meter

By data mining, data visualization, Tweet-o-Meter, Twitter, Twitter Data, Urban Data

As regular readers will know our Tweet-o-Meter features tweets per minute within a 30km area of New York, London, Paris, Munich, San Francisco, Barcelona, Oslo, Tokyo, Toronto, Rome, Moscow and Sydney.

Ben Blundell, here at CASA, has taken some time off from our TOTeM project and has hooked up a series of panel meters to the script via a custom arduino module. The result is a suitably ‘steam punk’ version of Tweets per minute in New York, London and Paris. We would of hooked up Munich but ran out of meters:

Analog Tweet-O-Meter from Benjamin Blundell on Vimeo.


All it needs now is a brass case and an ‘on/off’ handle…

Currently in beta and part of our wider ‘Ask’ tool it allows anyone to ‘mine’ data from Twitter or carry out a survey of either the world, a continent, a nation, a city or a local area. In short, we think it has notable potential for social science and the analysis of trends and relationships in a variety of areas.

We have run various beta tests on data collection with the main mining process starting next week over a 24 hour period. We aim to collect all tweets with a geo-location tag in the above cities, this is a large amount of data allowing various social, spatial and temporal analysis to be carried out.

The system is under development here at CASA as part of a wider survey tool as part of the NeISS project being coded by Steven Gray in association with Urban Tick, currently carrying out analysis on the data sampled so far.

See http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/tom/ to view the Tweet-o-Meter, we should have some early analysis soon and graphs for the cities within the next day or so. For those too young or perhaps simply nostalgic for the late 70’s/early 80’s hit that inspired the work, here is PopMusik via YouTube (its great…).

Thanks go to Ben and Steven for their work on this – see Bens http://www.section9.co.uk/, and Stevens http://stevenjamesgray.com/ for more info on their work both inside and outside of CASA time. Thanks also go to Russ Garrett (russ.garrett.co.uk/) and the London Hackspace for help with the code.

Writing: OmmWriter – Write those Posts/Papers Quicker…

By blog writting, how to write

A post of a slightly different flavour this morning (bare with us), as recently we have been churning out the words for various papers/reports and it got us thinking. Writing, as i think we all know, can be hard at times and the cold yet cluttered look of many word processing packages can make writing the latest scientific paper a laborious process. After all if you have a wide screen monitor and a browser with your word processor of choice side by side, it is only two clicks away from facebook, twitter, YouTube or any google search in the name of research. As such i thought i would write a quick post about OmmWriter, a new kind of word processor that somehow takes away the distractions, presenting a full screen experience without any icons or clutter in sight. In fact the only thing i can see at the moment, as i type, is a winter scene and a tree lost in mist at the bottom right of the screen – such is the interface.

While your typing OmmWriter also plays gentle calming music, its all very new age and to be honest something we would normally run a mile from. Its certainly a long way from the ethos that is all things digital and urban.

Yet, there is something strangely compelling about the whole experience, sure it cant help with the content but for anyone wishing to find a new way to write i heartily recommend taking a look at OmmWriter. It is available free of charge, currently only for the Mac but a windows version seems to be in the works. If they could just put an image of the city in the distance…

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