Brum Twitterverse tracked

Further to the Brum Twitter Cloud ponderings, Martin, aka @mawhin, has cracked it.

Keeping the techy bit short, he’s made a “bot” called mawhin_bot1 which scours Twitter looking for people who live within a 10 mile radius of Birmingham. This bot then follows them which means this is a rough and ready automatic aggregation of tweets coming out of the city, and it’s available as a feed.

Useless on a day to day basis, for sure, and I’m already following many of the people the bot has found, but should some sort of major event happen in the city this would provide a one-click snapshot of people’s reactions on Twitter. And at the end of the day it’s data which can be processed and turned into something else, which is kinda the point.

Thanks Mawhin!