Twitter Weather Map United States

How this works

Talking about the weather. You often do that to just keep a conversation going. People do the same on twitter (among other things) and the map above tries to give you a picture of the weather in United States by tracking these conversations.

This is just a simple example to illustrate the hidden power and possible emergence that lies within social media, presence services and livestreams.

This is a quick hack inspired by metaroll.de. Using geonames.org and summize.com I fetch messages from twitter which contain words about the weather in United States. A simple algorithm measures what people are talking about and renders a KML file which gets displayed above. The file gets updated every hour. Have a look at wetter.orf.at for a comparison with actual meteo data.

June 2008 - Prototype done in three hours by Walter Rafelsberger.
(Implementing Caching took a bit longer ;-))
twitter.com/walterra

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Weather icons from nordicweather.com

Hosted by Metaportal der Medienpolemik / Mind Your Own Business