Twittering On In A Flash (Of Light)

We are a chatty lot! Social media demonstrates a basic human need; the desire to communicate with others.

TweetPing

And if you ever doubted have active Twitter is a global communication tool, have a look at TweetPing (above), the brainchild of Franck Ernewein, a French web designer.

Every time a tweet is made somewhere in the world Tweetping gives of a light flash, superimposed on a map of the Earth.

But the site provides more details than a simple visual reference.  Activity by continent is detailed in the bottom section of the design -  the total number of tweets, total number of words, characters and the last #hashtags and @mentions.

Here is one hour of the Twitterverse in action presented in just five minutes


There are other excellent alternatives to the above. Frog Design's "A World Of Tweets" also presents data on a map showing where people are tweeting at from the past hour. A region's heatmap gets "hotter" depending on the activity.

A World Of Tweets

Tweereal's animation on the map features only those tweets containing geo-tags (coordinates)

Tweereal

So is Twitter the collective consciousness of the 'Net as some pundits suppose? It must be coming close to be reaching this status as one in eight people in the world tweet, albeit that the range of content followed is often confined to relatives, celebrities and a few chosen brands.

Patrick Meier of National Geographic quotes Hillary Clinton as saying in 2010, that social media is the new nervous system of our plant.  Certainly if you throw in other social media maps such as these for Flickr, FourSquare and Facebook you get a better overview of global activity, but is activity enough to gauge the prevailing mood.

For this you really need to add a layer of sentiment analysis. The Global Twitter Heartbeat Project is heading in this direction. Here is their Hurricane Sandy Tweetbeat.

Related articles

• Will researchers ever be able to wrap their arms around Twitter?
• Social Media: Pulse of the Planet?

Not Such A Pretty Picture

It may look like a pleasing pattern but each of these red dots represents a bomb that fell on London during the Blitz (derived from the German term ‘Blitzkrieg’) from October 1940 until mid June in 1941.

The Bomb Sight project is the work of The National Archives in the UK. They scanned original 1940's bomb census maps , geo-referenced the maps and digitally captured the geographical locations of all the falling bombs recorded on the original map.

The data was then been  integrated into 2 different types of applications - an interactive web-mapping application and an Android App with an Augmented Reality view to reveal the locations of the bombs projected into the current urban landscape. So if you are visiting London you can stand on a street holding your phone  and point it in the direction you are interested in. The Bomb Sight App uses your camera and GPS to display all the bombs that fell nearby to where you are.

One can only be grateful that Time Travel has yet to materialise - actually being in the Blitz in real life would have been anything but entertaining!

Related articles

• Blitz interactive map unveiled
• Bomb Sight - Mapping the World War 2 London Blitz Bomb Census

Professional Networking - Why It Matters

TheDigitalConsultant LinkedIn Network
(Associates named removed)
Click in image then click again for the larger chart

The Tools and Links section of this blog contains links to many programmes that can create visualisations of your networks.

One of the more interesting is LinkedIn Maps which maps your professional network and demonstratesthe relationships between you and your connections.

In today's world where skills are increasingly being traded as much as money, your personal brand is all important.

Visualising your professional networks will enable you to see the areas where you can and need to build associations. Restricting your associations to school friends and employees is not going to get you far.

As LinkedIn's Ali Imam says. "With it you can better leverage your professional network to help pass along job opportunities, seek professional advice, gather insights, and more."

Joining LinkedIn groups allied to your brand also provides a great marketing opportunity for the products and services you provide. In the case of this blog for example,  referrals from LinkedIn outnumber those from Facebook 2-1.






 DJ Patil is the Chief Scientist at LinkedIn and in the above video he is explaining his network on large sheets of paper. Clearly I have a lot of networking still to do!

Related articles

• Professional Social Network LinkedIn Prices IPO At $45 Per Share, High End Of Range (techcrunch.com)