My latest client project, lastminute.com Mood Of The Nation Map has gone live!

This Twitter mashup searches for #goodmood and #badmood tweets and displays them on a map as colour coded icons, which indicates how the nation is feeling, pink is good, grey is bad. The app also shows a live stream of #goodmood and #badmood tweets.

Take a look at http://moodofthenationmap.com.

A couple of weeks back I refreshed my now year-old #uksnow Map and created a second generation version, #uksnow Map 2.0 (cliché intended). The new map works on the same principles as the original map but this time the geocoding and processing is done server-side, which gives the option to explore the tweet data in the future.

Twitter users can help create a live snow map of the UK by tweeting the hashtag #uksnow, a subjective rating out of ten for how heavy the snowfall is, and their location as the first half of their postcode or location name.

The new app has been very popular an has had over 160,000 hits and has recorded 60,000 reports since it went live before Christmas.

The #uksnow hashtag was recently unveiled as the 8th most discussed news hashtag of 2009, which I believe shows how a good visualisation such as this can drive hashtag usage.

Check out the new map at http://uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk/.

If you want to put a map widget on your own website or blog, insert this script tag…

<script src="http://uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk/scripts/embed.js"></script>

…which will embed a widget into your page like below:

Andy Hawkin (@andiih) has created an iPhone/iPod Touch version of the map, and is available to download from iTunes.

After the success of the #ukhols Map, Vodafone commissioned me to create a live top 40 chart of what people are listening to on Twitter, to promote the Vodafone Music Store but also for a bit of fun.

Real-Time Top 40 is driven by people voting for music on Twitter, using the hashtag #RealTimeTop40 followed by the name of the artist and song they are listening to.

The site launched 17th September ‘09 and can be found at http://realtimetop40.com. The launch gained lots of coverage, including:

• Mashable (17/09/09)
• TechRadar UK (17/09/09)
• PocketLint (18/09/09)
• ElectricPig (18/09/09)
• The Mirror (19/09/09)

Gary Go, The Script & Take That @ Old Trafford Cricket Ground, Manchester 23/06/09

More photos from the concert

Last month I was asked by Vodafone UK to create a Twitter mashup to map the UK’s holiday destinations, to promote their Summer Roaming promotion. Based on that original concept, and with additional ideas put in by myself, ukholsmap.com was born!

The map builds on the tweet format used for the #uksnow Map and uses the hashtag #ukhols to collect and map tweets based on contributor’s holiday destination. If contributors include the first half of their home postcode and their destination, the map will draw a line between the two places and tell you how far you are travelling. Visitors to the site can also see the UK’s top 10 holiday destintations, and read individual Tweets on the map.

The site soft-launched 6 days ago and so far has had 6000 visitors and 500 tweets, and has already been featured on many tech sites, including;

http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.mirror.co.uk/
http://www.techradar.com/
http://www.brandrepublic.com/
http://www.pocket-lint.com/
http://creativity-online.com/

Check it out: http://ukholsmap.com

To get around the problem of json_decode() limiting ints, I added a regex replace to change large numbers to strings by adding quote marks around them. json_decode() then sees the number as a string and parses it correctly.

An example search function with the fix is shown below:

function TwitterSearch($query) {
  $search_url = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q='.$query;
  $ch = curl_init($search_url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
  $json = curl_exec($ch);
   
  // -- int-max fix - convert number to string
  $json = ereg_replace('([:])([0-9]{10})([,}])', '\\1"\\2"\\3', $json);
   
  $result = json_decode($json);
  curl_close($ch);
  return $result;
}

The regex here only looks for 10-digit numbers, but this can easily be changed for larger numbers by changing the {10} to say {10,16} to catch 10 to 16 digit numbers.

I’m going to include the usual bits but there will be a social interaction theme to it too

If I had a nasty 90’s animated ‘Under construction’ gif, I’d add it… but thankfully I don’t.

To enable this I changed the webUrlBuilder Url to…

<project name="MyProject.Trunk.Continuous">
  ...
  <sourcecontrol type="svn">
    ...
    <webUrlBuilder type="websvn">
      <url>http://trac.myserver.com/MyProject/changeset/{1}{0}</url>
    </webUrlBuilder>
  </sourcecontrol>
  ...
</project>

…which now matches the url required to show file differences in Trac.

I’d never heard this until I listened to John Mayer’s Where The Light Is album on Spotify. Loving the tuning and the harmonics!