Monday
Nov302009
Iran: What Do 1.4 Million Tweets Look Like?
Monday, November 30, 2009 at 11:46
An interesting "interim" post from Ali Fisher at Wandren PD, who is pursing an ongoing protest to map the use of Twitter in the post-election crisis. He has added to his October post, "The Iranian Election: Following a Conversation", by taking on the daunting task of mapping data from those using the #IranElection tag:
His work is at an early stage, but here's a number to make the head spin: in the 10 weeks after the election, there were 1,466,708 tweets using #IranElection.
Equally important (from my point of view), there are still quite a few using that tag, even as we add #16Azar.
The level of traffic limited the extent to which a user could keep up with the flow of information from #IranElection. at its peak the #tag was running at over 22,500 tweets an hour and nearly 100,000 tweets in a day. There is little anyone can get from reading 375 tweets a minute, forcing users to rely on filters such as the more specific tags, or choosing only to follow certain users; narrowing the field of view but having a chance to understand what is being produced.
His work is at an early stage, but here's a number to make the head spin: in the 10 weeks after the election, there were 1,466,708 tweets using #IranElection.
Equally important (from my point of view), there are still quite a few using that tag, even as we add #16Azar.