{"id":269,"date":"2009-02-01T23:13:46","date_gmt":"2009-02-01T23:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/?p=269"},"modified":"2020-05-21T11:27:42","modified_gmt":"2020-05-21T11:27:42","slug":"let-it-snow-twitter-becomes-a-weather-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/02\/01\/let-it-snow-twitter-becomes-a-weather-service\/","title":{"rendered":"Let it snow… Twitter becomes a weather service"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m a bit of a Twitter<\/a> fan.\u00a0 Even I didn\u2019t think I\u2019d ever look at twitter for a weather report though.<\/p>\n

As those of us in the UK will know, there\u2019s some pretty cold weather here at the moment with snow being predicted over the next few days.\u00a0 This afternoon I started seeing a few people I know from Seloc<\/a> tweeting about snow where they were.\u00a0 After a while I started seeing people using a twitter hashtag of #uksnow<\/a>. Great idea, by reading all the tweets with that hash I could read where it was snowing the most.\u00a0 This data was initially collected via Hashtags.org but we found a better solution in the hashtag tracker<\/a> from BrandMentions – this also covers Instagram as well as Twitter.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s now 11pm and I\u2019m watching CSI and thinking about going to bed. Seeing as I have a 50 mile commute in the morning I thought I\u2019d logon and see how the weather is looking.\u00a0 In the space of a few hours the #uksnow tweets have organised themselves into a format of post code plus heaviness of snow out of 10 \u2013 so something like \u2018#uksnow KT22 5\/10\u2019<\/p>\n

With the info being in a known format, some enterprising chap<\/a> has mashed-up<\/a> the tweets with google maps<\/a> so you can now see where the snow is falling.\u00a0 All based on the real-time info posted on twitter.\u00a0 Its impressive stuff \u2013 especially seeing how it evolved over a few hours!\u00a0 A good example of how crowdsourcing can work for a common cause.\u00a0 If you can get the information into a known and structured data set it can be used in so many different ways.<\/p>\n

\"#uksnow<\/a><\/p>\n

Check it out:\u00a0 http:\/\/uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk\/<\/a>\u00a0(original link http:\/\/www.benmarsh.co.uk\/snow\/<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Update… some more info on how it all came together courtesy of Paul Clarke: http:\/\/honestlyreal.wordpress.com\/2009\/02\/01\/a-flurry-of-uksnow\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Update 2:\u00a0 there’s now an updated page at http:\/\/uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m a bit of a Twitter fan. Even I didn\u2019t think I\u2019d ever look at twitter for a weather report though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,10,6],"tags":[224,222,221,223,524,24],"class_list":["post-269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home","category-social-media","category-tech","tag-crowd-source","tag-google-maps","tag-mash-up","tag-seloc","tag-tech","tag-twitter","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1177,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions\/1177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}