#worldcup tweets, viz v1

this is a visualisation of the use of the official country hash tags (eg #aus) in the twitter search stream of #worldcup since june 12th.

if you can't see anything you don't have java installed. you must feel very sad about that. i wouldn't worry too much, the firefox java plugin has been very flaky for me anyways. it's not interactive so you can go watch it on vimeo instead if you like.

• orb size denotes the relative frequency of the use of the tag.
• lines join orbs if there was a high frequency of both countries appearing in the same tweet (only the top 10 frequent pairs shown)
• motion means nothing at all, i just got distracted.
• the rate of progress is roughly an hour of tweets per half second of animation.
• the bit where the edges vanish and all the orbs go the same size was a twitter outage.

this animation was written in processing. the code for it is on github. it makes use of this processing example (though with heavy mods to support changing size). was writing something that looked slightly different until i saw this awesome visualisation from the guardian and decided orb thingies are the way to go!

next i'll work on weighting the edges based on frequency and perhaps introducing a spring layout. in the meantime check out my other random stuff.

jun 20 2010