Just Landed in…
Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data [link to http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/just-landed-processing-twitter-metacarta-hidden-data no longer works]:
This got me thinking about the data that is hidden in various social network information streams – Facebook & Twitter updates in particular. People share a lot of information in their tweets – some of it shared intentionally, and some of it which could be uncovered with some rudimentary searching. I wondered if it would be possible to extract travel information from people’s public Twitter streams by searching for the term ‘Just landed in…’.
This is a cool emergent effect of people chaotically announcing themselves on Twitter, a MetaCarta service that allows you to get longitude/latitude and a bunch of other bits all coming together to make something really cool looking.
Via Information Aesthetics [link to http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/05/just_landed_visualizing_the_tweets_of_people_that_have_just_landed.html no longer works]
Looking at the video, it was mentally jarring to have the paths be neither (parts of) great circles nor ballistic trajectories.