Matt Stiles // The Daily Viz

Dozens of technologists and journalists today descended on Google’s beautiful Mountain View, Calif., campus for a discussion about technology and journalism. The conference, organized by the Center for Investigative Reporting, led to some prolific tweeting, as one might expect.

I used a simple script to ingest the 1,500-plus tweets with the search API into a sqlite database. This chart, made with Google Docs’ chart tools (when in Rome…), shows the top 25 most prolific tweeters (as of 4:30 p.m. pacific) who used the #techraking and #techrakingcir hash tags.

Congrats, Ian Hill, you top the list (which includes, I think, some spammers): 

This is just a quick chart made in a rush. Feel free to download and check out the pipe-delimited data for yourself: #techraking | #techrakingcir. Send me your visualizations or thoughts, and I’ll post ‘em here. See the full list of Twitter user counts here.

Following Nathan Yau’s excellent tutorial for creating heat maps with time series data (he used vehicle accidents by day for a year), I visualized 3,559 of my tweets back to March 2009. 

These maps, created with a modified R script from the tutorial, show how often I sent tweets (both personal and RT), with darker shades representing more activity. It’s fun to go back to the dark days and recall what sparked flurries of tweets: 

Using Tableau Public, my NPR colleague Andy Carvin visualized thousands of his tweets about the Arab Spring: 

View larger, interactive version

This app, Tweet Topic Explorer, creates proportional symbols based on the frequency with which you use specific words. Here are my tweets since early April. This isn’t a surprise, I guess: 

H/T: Becca Aaronson

Reaction to New York Times editor Bill Keller’s recent piece about Twitter appears to be mixed — at least according to a quick sentiment analysis of related tweets. 

See…

Excellent piece

And…

Must you always nay say, @nytkeller?

Here’s how this application charted recent tweets mention Keller: 

UPDATE (10 a.m. Monday): Since the publication in the print edition of the magazine, it seems reaction is much more positive: 

One hundred is the new 140 on Twitter, according to my wife. How am I doing? My tweets since August 2009: 

Tweets: 1523. Average tweet: 89 characters.

Longest tweet:

RT @KenLegler: MERRYº°¨¨°º¤ø °¨¨°º¤ø ¸„ø¤º°¨¨°º¤ø¸CHRISTMAS¤ø ¸„ø¤º°¨¨°º¤ø ø¤º°¨¨¨°º¤ø ¸„ø¤MERRYº°¨¨°º¤ø ¸„ø¤º°¨¨°º¤Ã

Shortest tweet:

Fire! 

This is an oldie, but a goodie: A color-coded chart that helps decipher the Twitter API, created by the company’s platform services lead, Raffi Krikorian. Each color represents a different field of data created each time you tweet. All this data is available to developers to build cool stuff like TweetStats, Klout and the like: