
Heatmap of Twitter knowledge by location (heatmap.js + Google Maps) - drpancake
http://www.inboxq.com/location
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IanDrake
Neat, but on just about every topic there's a huge bias towards California,
North East Coast, and England (because those are tech hubs?).

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eloisius
Agreed. This would be way cooler if it took total tweet density into
consideration so that it wasn't always London, NY and LA.

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answerly
Definitely something we've considered for a future enhancement. Our summer
intern worked on this map over the last few days and we wanted to release it
before he headed back to the UK later this week.

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IanDrake
I wouldn't mind getting my hands on a summer intern who could turn that out in
a few days.

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answerly
James is awesome. And, we found him via Hacker News!

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thetwentyone
Population size needs to be factored in. NYC, LA/SF, Boston, London, Chicago,
and a couple other large cities are pretty much always the top, primarily
because they are the largest English speaking population centers.

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Rabidgremlin
Might be nice if the map didn't hide part of the world (Australia, New Zealand
etc)

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skeletonjelly
Sad to see that Australia didn't make the cut :(

It looks like they're fetching a static image from Google Maps and using a
jQuery library to do the heatmap (which uses canvas). Not sure why they made
it that way. Would have been a perfect fit if they fetched a rectangular map
and got moved that text on the right.

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jmjerlecki
It would be great to do something like this for an election. A heatmap for
people who voted #red or #blue. Seems like a lot of neat uses for this.

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nickburlett
On topics where there's not many tweets (e.g. haskell), it's nearly impossible
to tell that anything on the map changed at all. Perhaps the data also needs
to be normalized?

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skeletonjelly
Yeah it needs a few things done before it can become usable. Get rid of the
assumption knowledge = frequency of keyword. Normalize the data. Account for
population differences.

Would also be nice if you could pan around but it looks like the code relies
on a static image.

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answerly
Thanks for the great suggestions. All are features that we'll add in the
future. The goal was really to get something out there that had a small bit of
utility and spend more time on it if people found the visualization
interesting. As I mentioned a few threads up, this is something that our
outgoing summer intern worked on during his last few days with us and we
wanted to release it before he headed back to school.

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skeletonjelly
You're most welcome! I hope I didn't come off too harsh - I understand it's an
early preview as most things are. I look forward to seeing it flourish.

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gojomo
Nice idea, but no queries I could think of yielded any surprises, and almost
every topic was dominated by the media capitals of NY, LA, and London.

Apparently, also, there is no expertise worth plotting anywhere in Asia or
even Australia.

It was more fun to type in diseases and pretend the overlay was a map of
contagion. EG: [swine flu]... There's a massive outbreak 1500 miles west of
the Galapagos!

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AlexC04
I hunted around for a few things like "node.js", "Php", "True Blood", "Harry
Potter", etc... they all fit within the same pattern you noted. (with minor,
or not-unexpected variances)

My favorite was "Maple Syrup"

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ashrust
Gotta wonder what the defn of 'knowledge' is here - just mentions of the
keyword? Does that indicate knowledge?

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answerly
No- it's not just keyword mentions. Our main product analyzes the both the
content of an individuals Tweets and social factors to make decisions about
what they know. I'd be happy to share more about how we do that- shoot me a
note at joe@inboxq.com if you want to chat.

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rorrr
You need to normalize the results by population density.

Pretty much anything I type, I get the same results - NY + LA + SF + London.

