Playing with UKGC09 tweets and Wordle/Google

As I said before, UKGovCamp '09 was very inspiring - and got me thinking that in this day of mash-ups and widget-gidgets, one probably doesn't need to actually do much coding at all. I put my theory to the test, wrote a quick Perl script to chirp all the #ukgc09 tweets for the day of the event, the day before, and the day after, and shoe-horned the data into a couple of places which could be prettier if I had more time.

Here's a Wordle tag cloud of all tweets over the 3-day period:


(Click to view large, you'll need Java.)

For fun, here's a similar Wordle for the Tweet authors themselves:



Finally, here's a time-series plot of all the tweets over the 3 day period, on a Google graph so you can zoom in and out and click on tweets. The y-axis indicates roughly how much twitter activity there is in a 5-minute slot.

All good, clean fun.

Update Feb 16th: Here's the code I used to grab the #ukgc09 tweets - fairly simple Perl, requires a system with the JSON library and command line Curl installed (see code for links). I used a Mac with curl already installed, and added the JSON library using "perl -MCPAN -e 'install JSON'" from the terminal. YMMV.