City ‘B’ – What City am I?
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What City am I?
Paint By Tweets – What City am I? [City B]
Author Archives: John
Paint By Tweets – What City am I? [City A]
Paint By Tweets: Geo-Tweet Heatmap of Melbourne
We have been having a bit of fun with Trendsmap over the past few weeks building visualisations out of geo-coded tweet data.
What is a geo-coded tweet? In basic terms, it is a tweet where the person has made available their precise location as part of the tweet. This is typically done using the GPS in many of today’s smart phones running twitter clients.
The images below show a heatmap representation of the density of geo-tweets across Melbourne, Australia.
Click on each image to see a larger resolution version. (right click and ‘save image as..’ to download a copy).
More images to come, but next time we will not tell you which city is represented. You will have to guess!
Melbourne Australia in Geo-tweet view (click image for larger version)
Here you can see the distinctive outline of Port Phillip Bay as the ‘void’ in the middle, the city of Geelong to the bottom left. The gridded road network is also just visible here, and more clearly the snake-like lines representing the metro train network.
April Fools 2011: Trending Links and Videos on Trendsmap
If you happened to crawl out from under a rock on April 1st 2011…
…no one would blame you for thinking that Google’s Gmail can be controlled by movement, Youtube is 100 years old, or that IKEA have made a high chair for dogs.
As Trendsmap shows us the interwebs were so abuzz with rumors, jokes and pranks that I’m sure even veterans of the internet had to think twice before writing off some ‘news’ as bogus… It was a crazy news day!
So, all in all, it was a good day to pretty much ignore the news completely, or from a PR perspective, maybe it was a good time to get some bad news out in the public sphere as it was likely that no one would believe you anyway!
@Scobleizer even asked of his followers:
If anyone has dirt on me can you blog it tonight? @TechCrunch has an article that seems serious but I can’t tell for sure because it’s 4-1.
As we watched April Fools day unfold on twitter (via Trendsmap.com!) we diligently went about collecting all the top links and videos that people were talking about…
Below are some of these! Enjoy.
Trends that Matter – Follow Local Twitter Trends
Over that past few months we have been creating Trendsmap Twitter alerts via localised Twitter accounts. The reason we’ve done this is that we realised early on that the trends that matter the most are those that actually mean something to you.
So with this in mind we decided that we needed to have the ability to alert our Trendsmap users to events and breaking stories that were happening ‘close to home’…
Introducing Trendsmap alerts via Localised Twitter Accounts!
As an example, I follow the TrendsAustralia Twitter account to keep up to date with what is happening on the Trendsmap Australia page. And I also follow the TrendsMelbourne Twitter account to keep on top of local news and events.
You can do the same! (In about 5 seconds):
- Go to http://trendsmap.com/local
- Click on a Country or City link. I’m going to click on ‘United States‘.
- Then click on the ‘Follow on Twitter‘ link at the top right of the next screen.
- Done!
Below is a list of the Current top 10 City Twitter Accounts ranked by followers.
- Johannesburg : TrendsJoBurg
- Melbourne : TrendsMelbourne
- Cape Town : TrendsCapeTown
- Toronto : TrendsToronto
- Lima : TrendsLima
- Lagos : TrendsLagos
- Montreal : TrendsMontreal
- Madrid : TrendsMadrid
- Bogotã : TrendsBogota
- Buenos Aires : TrendsBA
** UPDATE **
The wonderful John Barratt has just made it even easier for you to follow your local Twitter trends.
You can still follow the steps above if you’re keen to discover and browse the actual content on Trendsmap as well as ‘follow’ on Twitter.
However, if you just want to go straight to a list of links to the various Twitter Accounts, then go here.
Happy Birthday to Us!
Trendsmap is 1 year old today and we thought we’d use this joyous day to tell you about some of the things we’ve done recently.
Breaking Alerts
We have set up breaking alert Twitter accounts for over 100 locations around the world, with more coming soon. You can follow these to know what’s being discussed in your town right now, and some of the most popular ones include Melbourne, Toronto, Auckland, London, Johannesburg, Chicago and Mexico City. You can see the full list of accounts here.
Location pages
Our location pages (eg. New York), have a lot of detailed trending data for a city, and are often overlooked. We’ve spruced them up so you can more easily see:
- Breaking trends
- Trending links, videos and images
- People and hashtags that are popular over the last 7 days
Our location pages are all listed here.
ABC Australian Election Trendsmap
We recently licensed a version of Trendsmap to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) for their coverage of the recent Australian election. We filtered purely on election based tweets, and had a timeline so trends could be viewed over time.
World Cup
We also created a version of Trendsmap for the World Cup, which proved a great way to follow the games. Below is one of the visualisations we created from it.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5GVJHx0Cx0]
We’re continuing to work on new features, and if you’d like to give us feedback, please visit our UserVoice.
Twitter Language Map
We have started to roll out support on Trendsmap for more languages. Some of you may have seen improvements in languages including Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Dutch. For example, South America now has a much better coverage of local language trends, as well as much of Western Europe.
As part of the work to make this happen we created a global map of what languages are typically used on Twitter from these locations. Whilst it is still a work in progress, it looked so nice, we thought we would share it with you all. This was created from 3 days of sampled tweets from across the globe. Click on the image below to see the a large version of the map.
Of interest here is the red streak that spreads South-South-East from the 0,0 lat/lon point just off the West coast of Africa. It’s not clear why this is the case. Perhaps it’s due to problems some devices/clients have with their GPS units, we’ve found a new island, or even a parallel universe. Hopefully it’s not another BP oil leak…
Stay tuned for more updates.
More than just English
Ignoring the non-English speaking world online means missing out on a very large, and rapidly growing portion of the internet. From the very first day we launched Trendsmap, the most common request we received was to track trends across the globe in languages other than English. It has been a little while now since we have made a significant change to Trendsmap, but we are excited to be closing in on a new release which will be the first step in achieving greater internationalisation.
Recently we did a trial in conjunction with the National TV broadcaster in the Netherlands, NOS during the recent national municipal elections there. Part of their election coverage including monitoring social media sites, including twitter, and in turn they used Trendsmap to identify local trends across the country during the election. For this to work we had to include Dutch tweets in the trends extraction, the result being a specialised version that showed Dutch & English trends from the Netherlands.
As part of the next step we are looking at including Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese on Trendsmap. Other languages would progressively follow thereafter. Also included in this beta version are a number of other enhancements including better word placement, and enhanced resolution of the map (you will be able to zoom in a bit more).
Here are some screen shots giving a good indication of the change it makes when you use tweets from the ‘local’ languages to generate trends.
This first image is from the current site showing the Netherlands :
This second one from our development version of the site shows the trends for the same region and time, but also using Dutch tweets to generate trends :
On a side note, if any geeky types out there happen to be heading to the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, WhereCamp in Mountain View, or Twitter’s Chirp Conference in San Francisco in the coming weeks, then please get in touch. We are heading over from Australia, and will otherwise be in San Francisco for the period, and would love to meet up whilst there.
^JB
Welcome to the Trendsmap Blog
Hello all you Trendsmappers.
We’ve a lot of exciting new things coming up so we thought we’d act like it’s 2006 and start a blog!
Firstly we wanted to share with you some of the fantastic coverage we’ve had since we launched way back in Sept 09:
- When we launched we were thrilled by the glowing reviews in Mashable, Download Squad and CNET.
- The Guardian in the UK used Trendsmap to illustrate how the Trafigura story broke. The same story was then covered on BBC Television and Techcrunch UK.
- The Guardian journalists seem to be a bit addicted since they’ve featured us a fair few times now.
- We’ve been tweeted about by everyone from Google and Twitter to Alyssa Milano, Philip Schofield (who?), and Shashi Tharoor.
- We’ve been getting warm fuzzy feelings from all the love shown at oneforty.
- Boingboing used Trendsmap to illustrate the internet tax protest in Mexico.
- Even though we’re still only covering English tweets we’ve been featured in Brazil, France, Germany and Sweden. We hope what they said was nice!
- It was nice to be written about by The Punch in our native Australia.
- And just this weekend we had a lovely feature on Lifehacker.
You can stay tuned on the new features we’ll be rolling out here, but we’d totally love it if you can fan us on our new Facebook page. We’ve got 3 x $100 Threadless.com vouchers that we’re giving away. Just become a fan before 31st March to enter the draw.
Naturally you should follow us on twitter, and we’ve got some fancy visualisations on our youtube channel.
Stay trendy!