Twitter-Calais mashup tracks IL-5 election buzz
Tim Finin, 4:02pm 24 February 2009WindyCitizen.com is “a crowd-powered front page for the Windy City” that “brings Chicagoans the best of the local web by letting them share, rate and discuss their favorite local news, photos, videos and more.”
Their Windy City Twitter Tracker mashup uses Open Calais as a named entity recognizer to track Tweets about candidates in the special election to fill the US House seat for Chicago’s 5th district that that Rahm Emanuel vacated. Calais might be overkill for this, since there is a small set of known candidates, but it’s an impressive semantic mashup nonetheless.
“We’re searching Twitter constantly to keep you up to date with the conversation about the IL-5 special election. The graph above lets you track buzz about the candidates over the last two weeks.”
The Windy City Twitter Tracker is probably written to be easily repurposed, judging from the Web site, which describe it as currently tracking the “Race for the 5th”. The mashup is credited to Whattech.
Ebiquity Blog
February 24th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Hey there! Glad to see you blogging about our little mashup.
One note though. We aren’t using Calais to find the tweets, just using the Twitter search api.
We are using Calais to mine links in tweets for Topics and Quotes. When hovering over the chart, the Topics are shown as “trends”.
Some Tweets have a “Preview Link” button which expands the tweet to show quotes pulled from the article link to in the tweet.
February 24th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Ah, I see. I had not explore your mashup enough. I had imagined you were running the tweets through Calais to have it do NER, which is why I thought it was overkill.