Mining twitter data

Who is the first reporter of the Mexico City earth quake?  I remember watching twitter second-by-second and @cjserrato was the first one reported the earth quake (the tweet id is 1630381373):

 

Mining twitter data is a huge challenge.  So far I have not been able to see many interesting data/text mining and data analytics around twitter data.  I have been playing the data lately, and here’s a thematic/topic graph I had – a visualization of all tweets of the last eight hours that are related to to “mexico city”:

 

You can tell that “Swine Flu” still at the center of all topics, whereas earthquake is clustered alone to the side.

Have you seen any interesting twitter analytics (by the way, I do not mean the twitter metrics or counters etc..)?

Jeff Clark of NeoFormix has a great set of application, the best I have found so far.  FlowingData is another one.

where is the “deep dive example” of attribution analytics?

First of all, this is Sunday morning. I am not going  to write anything that requires siginificant works from my thinking mind — but …

I have been wondering, for the last couple of days, why the “deep dive example” piece that I promised hasn’t come out yet. The reason is just getting too complicated: lack of motivation, busy at work, shifting focus on other things … and last but not least: twitter!

To be sure, I do not mean to join the fashion of crediting / blaming twitter for everything, including the latest recession. I just want to point out a plain and simple fact, that I have been looking, reading random things from twitter or related to twitter so much that it EATS up most of my FREE time; and worse yet, I notice some subtle changes in me, a little ADD like symptom; it erodes my concentration, cuts my usual chain of thoughts into short pieces and stires up my urge to surface, to verbalize anything and everything. 

It is a little sad to see how twitter is winning over the world of advertising, PR, News and celebrites; but it is truly scary to hear story about twitter’s invasion to education. 

I need to ban myself from twitter for a little while and see if the damage is irreversable.