Data Displayed
Want to know who's tweeting? If you live in the U.S., you probably think that most people under 35 spend the day publishing inane messages to anyone foolish enough to read them.
Social media is all the rage (does anybody say that any more? "All the rage?"), and with our 20/20 chauvinist myopia, we are inclined to think that whatever is being done by the hip and young in the U.S. is being done everywhere.
There's a wonderful website that gathers up statistical analyses and presents them as visual explorations. It's called "Information Aesthetics" and in one particularly fun post, it uses dots and a globe to represent the passing of a "Good morning" message from person to person via tweets (Twitter messages, for the astoundingly uninformed).
Watch as dawn breaks over America, and a massive concentration of dots springs up on the east coast, spreads thinly through the midwest, and intensifies again over the west coast. The rest of the world is predictably dark, with some concentrations in Japan and Hong Kong, and a bit in Europe. As the next day dawns in the far east, we see some activity there, and soon Europe lights up a little, though with nowhere near the enthusiasm of the U.S., or even the far east.
It's an interesting shorthand for the "twitterverse" as a whole. And watch this site for more visual takes on those piles of data we now have the power to assemble. Who said there wasn't anything new under the sun?
Social media is all the rage (does anybody say that any more? "All the rage?"), and with our 20/20 chauvinist myopia, we are inclined to think that whatever is being done by the hip and young in the U.S. is being done everywhere.
There's a wonderful website that gathers up statistical analyses and presents them as visual explorations. It's called "Information Aesthetics" and in one particularly fun post, it uses dots and a globe to represent the passing of a "Good morning" message from person to person via tweets (Twitter messages, for the astoundingly uninformed).
Watch as dawn breaks over America, and a massive concentration of dots springs up on the east coast, spreads thinly through the midwest, and intensifies again over the west coast. The rest of the world is predictably dark, with some concentrations in Japan and Hong Kong, and a bit in Europe. As the next day dawns in the far east, we see some activity there, and soon Europe lights up a little, though with nowhere near the enthusiasm of the U.S., or even the far east.
It's an interesting shorthand for the "twitterverse" as a whole. And watch this site for more visual takes on those piles of data we now have the power to assemble. Who said there wasn't anything new under the sun?
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