Visualizing Twitter reactions to Obama’s inauguration
The guys over at data-visualizing blog Flowing Data have put together an interesting way of watching how Twitter users felt about President Barack Obama’s inauguration this week. In the video they’ve created (found here), any time the word “inauguration” appeared in a single tweet on Twitter in a positive context — starting on the morning the day before the inauguration and continuing on up until now — a blacked-out world map represented it with a tiny blue dot. As the number of these tweets has increased over the course of this week, the dots have merged in heavily twittering cities to create larger dots. See screenshot above.
Obviously there are other sets of keywords that would have showed other trends in political tweeting, but this data certainly suggests how millions of users on the site voted in November.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.