WindyCitizen.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.

TechCrunch has a post Mining The Thought Stream on why Twitter continues to be hot even thought it doesn’t yet have a business case. The argument is that Twitter has fond a niche that none of the search engines covers well — providing visibility over the stream of consciousness of the Web. The final graf caught my attention:

“An undifferentiated thought stream of the masses at some point becomes unwieldy. In order to truly mine that data, Twitter needs to figure out how to extract the common sentiments from the noise (something which Summize was originally designed to do, by the way, but it was putting the cart before the horse—you need to be able to do simple searches before you start looking for patterns). But what is the best way to rank real-time search results—by number of followers, retweets, some other variable? It is not exactly clear. But if Twitter doesn’t solve this problem, someone else will and they will make a lot of money if they do it right.”

Akshay looked at the problem of analyzing tweets back in 2007 (see Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities). One difficulty is that tweets are necessarily short and telegraphic. This makes it hard to do any linguistic analysis with good accuracy. But, maybe if you can apply some back ground knowledge……

Amanda Lenhart and Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet Project have a six-page note on Twitter and status updating based on a survey of nearly 2300 adults in November and December of 2008. The findings are not very surprising and include:

• 11% of online adults use Twitter or update their status online
• Twitter users are mobile, less tethered by technology
• Younger internet users lead the way in using Twitter and similar services.

To me, the most notable item is one that suggests a very recent and sharp inclease in short, personal status updates.

“As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others.1 Just a few weeks earlier, in November 2008, 9% of internet users used Twitter or updated their status online and in May of 2008, 6% of internet users responded yes to a slightly different question, where users were asked if they used “Twitter or another ‘microblogging’ service to share updates about themselves or to see updates about others.”

I’d guess that this partly represents more people joining Facebook, creating an tipping point in the use of its status update feature.

Here at Ebiquity, we’ve had a number of great grad students. One of them, Akshay Java, hacked out a search engine for twitter posts around early April last year, and named it twitterment. He blogged about it here first. He did it without the benefit of the XMPP updates, by parsing the public timeline. It got talked about in the blogosphere, (including by Scoble), got some press, and there was an article in the MIT Tech review that used his visualization of some of the twitter links. It even got talked about in Wired’s blog, something we found out only yesterday. We were also told that three days after the post in Wired’s blog, someone somewhere registered the domain twitterment.com (I won’t feed them pagerank by linking!), and set up a page that looks very similar to Akshay’s. It has Google Adsense, and of course just passes the query to Google with a site restriction to twitter. So they’re poaching coffee and cookie money from the students in our lab

So of course we played with Akshay’s hack, hosted it on one of our university boxes for a few months, but didn’t really have the bandwidth or compute (or time) resources to keep up. Startups such as summize appeared later and provided similar functionality. For the last week or two we’ve  been moving the code of twitterment to Amazon’s cloud to restart the service. Of course, today comes the news that twitter might buy summize, quasi confirmed by Om Malik. Lesson to you grad students — if you come up with something clever, file an invention disclosure with your university’s tech transfer folks. And don’t listen to your advisors if they think that there isn’t a paper in what you’ve hacked — there may yet be a few million dollars in it

MarsPhoenix is twittering from the North polar region of Mars.

Here’s a great picture of my deployed arm with the scoop on the end: http://tinyurl.com/3s354p I can’t wait to dig in the dirt next week. 10:14 PM May 29, 2008 from web

Phoenix is even carrying on conversations with some of its more than 10,000 followers.

@infoholic Yup, I can dig into frozen ground as hard as concrete. The scoop has special blades and a powered “rasp” to scrape ice. Cool! 11:09 PM May 29, 2008 from web in reply to infoholic

My first thought was that I wouldn’t want to be there when NASA gets the cell phone bill for little Phoenix. But then I read the story in the NYT, Phoenix to Earthlings: I’ve Landed! Awesome!, and found that,like a lot of important entities, Phoenix has people who do this for it.

“For users of Twitter, a Web microblogging service, the Phoenix Mars lander has been sending pithy news “tweets” to the cellphones and computers of interested ‘followers.’ As of late Friday, the Phoenix lander had 9,636 followers at Twitter, more than triple the number of a week earlier. According to twitterholic.com, it ranks No. 30 among all Twitter feeds in the solar system.
…
Of course, the messages are not coming from Mars. Instead, Veronica McGregor, the news services manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has been playing the part of Phoenix each night after she gets home from work, forwarding questions to the science team and then posting answers.”

Can it be true? Russell Beattie posts that on Twitter there are nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls. Spam does exist on Twitter, of course, but it does seem to be less of a problem than on the Blogosphere, Web or email. Maybe it’s because that search engines don’t treat tweets like Web pages or blog posts.