[twitter-dev] Re: Quick hack: using Twitter with Yahoo Placemaker to geolocate tweets
Brendan O'Connor wrote: On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 8:08 PM, Nancy M nmira...@gmail.com mailto:nmira...@gmail.com wrote: I do like the maps, but 50% error -- you would not possibly get on an airplane with that kind of error rate, would you? And I don't think I'd want to make decisions about my demographics on something with that error rate either. Why not take the IPS and bounce them against whois or something? This app isn't about that; it's about what places a person is talking about. You can't use their IP's, the point is to identify locations in the text of their tweets. (I asked whether the app was looking at the author's location to help disambiguate because i thought it could be used to improve accuracy; but this is hypothetical.) Thanks, that is exactly the point, as explained in the only text on the page: TweetLocations analyses twitter updates and checks if they contain any geographical locations. Instead of relying on the Twitter location in your user profile TweetLocations finds the locations you talked about. :-) In defense of error rates, if the task is just to get a sense about what regions of the world someone tends to talk about, then something like a 10% or 20% error rate might be ok; and it was lower than that for Chris's and some of the other example twitter users the app was suggesting. Well, error rates are a good question. How would a dumb computer know what the context is in 140 characters? Notice that if you use My name is Jack London and I live in Toronto PlaceMaker ony shows Toronto, which is impressive! But here's one case where errors are very bad. One thing I thought was great about the map UI was that you can see a flag all by itself out in mexico or something, and be curious what the person is saying about mexico, and click on it to see the message. If errors tend to be geographic outliers then they really hurt this use case since geographic outliers are easy to see and are interesting simply because they are unusual (oh, brendan's always boring and talks about california, but look, one time he talked about switzerland! oops, not really.) How could I work around that? I think the issue with some of the errors the yahoo placemaker thing was making with my tweets is, is that it's not integrating very well prior information about how commonly those locations are talked about. I think scala is only rarely used to mean the switzerland canton, but is quite often used to mean the programming language; but placemaker is happy to use a rare, unlikely sense of scala here. Well, PlaceMaker is a DB of geographical locations (which you can even download - http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/data/) and doesn't compare with a DB of programming languages. It would be interesting to see how it differs from the other (less open) services out there. Maybe I'll use Simon Willison's geocoders and only return if there is a match. http://github.com/simonw/geocoders/tree/master regards Chris
[twitter-dev] Re: Quick hack: using Twitter with Yahoo Placemaker to geolocate tweets
Reading this discussion reminded me of the flickr API. Might be another good way to find geo locations? Perhaps using it in combination with Placemaker could help reduce the error rate. I think with flickr you can only search for specific words, but on the other hand you can find locations for things (like Notre Dame), not only for names of places. http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.places.find.html
[twitter-dev] Re: Quick hack: using Twitter with Yahoo Placemaker to geolocate tweets
Hi Chris, Very nice! I'd be interested in a how-to. Jonas On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 8:04 PM, Christian Heilmann chris.heilm...@gmail.com wrote: http://isithackday.com/hacks/placemaker/tweet-locations.php?user=codepo8 What do you think? I can put up a how-to if wanted. cheers Chris
[twitter-dev] Re: Quick hack: using Twitter with Yahoo Placemaker to geolocate tweets
On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 8:08 PM, Nancy M nmira...@gmail.com wrote: I do like the maps, but 50% error -- you would not possibly get on an airplane with that kind of error rate, would you? And I don't think I'd want to make decisions about my demographics on something with that error rate either. Why not take the IPS and bounce them against whois or something? This app isn't about that; it's about what places a person is talking about. You can't use their IP's, the point is to identify locations in the text of their tweets. (I asked whether the app was looking at the author's location to help disambiguate because i thought it could be used to improve accuracy; but this is hypothetical.) In defense of error rates, if the task is just to get a sense about what regions of the world someone tends to talk about, then something like a 10% or 20% error rate might be ok; and it was lower than that for Chris's and some of the other example twitter users the app was suggesting. But here's one case where errors are very bad. One thing I thought was great about the map UI was that you can see a flag all by itself out in mexico or something, and be curious what the person is saying about mexico, and click on it to see the message. If errors tend to be geographic outliers then they really hurt this use case since geographic outliers are easy to see and are interesting simply because they are unusual (oh, brendan's always boring and talks about california, but look, one time he talked about switzerland! oops, not really.) I think the issue with some of the errors the yahoo placemaker thing was making with my tweets is, is that it's not integrating very well prior information about how commonly those locations are talked about. I think scala is only rarely used to mean the switzerland canton, but is quite often used to mean the programming language; but placemaker is happy to use a rare, unlikely sense of scala here. -- Brendan O'Connor - http://anyall.org
