

Finding Local Twitter Trends with Perl - ilintner
http://www.dotcodedump.com/2009/07/finding-local-twitter-trends.html

======
jayb
If anybody wants trends in their city, <http://happn.in> might be what you're
looking for.

To add to the discussion, here are some of the things that make Happn.in tick:

* We throw out trends that occur in more than N (currently, N=3) cities. This gets rid of the Michael Jacksons and Swine Flus.

* We've built up a sizable list of stopwords that include things like 'and', 'or', 'but', and also 'google', 'twitter', 'lol', etc.

* We've built a list of users who contribute little content to Twitter, and ignore their tweets. There are some other spam-blocking measures in place.

* We throw out retweets, urls and hashtags. This gets the trends away from memes and blog posts, and helps to highlight real-world stuff.

* We don't include one-word phrases, Arguably, this makes us miss things, but the amount of noise when one-word phrases were included was too high.

------
brandnewlow
Fun idea.

1\. If I'm looking for local twitter trends, it might be accurate to show me
Michael Jackson...but is it interesting?

2\. When I look at this list, I want to DO something with it. Clickable terms
would be nice, even if they just dump me to a local Twitter search.

If you want to build one for Chicago that gets use, hit me up.

~~~
wmeredith
RE: point #1 - I concur. Maybe it would be helpful to filter out nationally
trending topics from your local list. After all I (user) only really care if
something locally is different.

------
dannyr
This is something I've been looking for.

I wonder how many users he is following to create the trend and also what kind
of users he's following.

------
brandnewlow
<http://www.happn.in/>

Has an API, too.

