Lesson 6 Microblogging part 4: A massive database

One of the very first social media services I used was del.icio.us (now delicious.com), the social bookmarking service, priceless in large research projects.
Twitter is similar but applied to tweets. By looking for the most popular hash-tags of the topics you are interested in you possess a data library without limits. And you can initiate valuable banks of information by creating and sharing your own hash-tags.

A very basic but illustrative example of Twitter data usage is Tweetping:

Screenshot (partial) of Tweetping. The application shows you world
tweets in real-time with lots of data. 

F-bomb is another simple example of how you can visualise Twitter data: it just shows in real-time all tweets on earth containing the F-word.

Here you can follow where and when "Happy New Year" was tweeted.

Twitter-data and your Eurovision research project
The examples above are amusing. But the Twitter feed can be used for very ambitious projects.
The links below give you an idea how Twitter data has been used to analyse Eurovision and it’s audiences. Twitter analysts knew in advance that Laureen would be the winner in 2012.

Measuring the popularity of the contestants in the Eurovision Song Contest using Twitter  (2012)
Forecasting of Events by Tweet Data Mining (2013)
Twitter as a Technology for Audiencing and Fandom: The #Eurovision Phenomenon 
Eurovision Song Contest 2011 – tweets visualized
Eurovision and Twitter - #Eurovision the ultimate in social TV? (2009)

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The lesson about Twitter, parts 1-5:
1. A general news channel (lists) published on April 7
2. A specific news channel (basic searches, using #)
3. A better search engine than Google?
4. A massive database (This story)
5. Teleportation machine and collaborative notebook (upcoming)