Jan 13, 2011 | Unveiling Project Haiti

A year and a day after the horrific events of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, I am unveiling a tool that lets you visualize all the Twitter chatter that took place shortly after news spread through the Internet. At present there are nearly 34,000 tweets on the site. The data was obtained via Infochimps and each Twitter user's self-reported location was passed through the Google Maps API (which unfortunately caps daily requests at 2500). Paul Kulchenko's examples of clustering dots and the use of styling in Google Maps API v3 made things a lot easier. This was also inspired in large part by gothub, a visualization of the commits on GitHub. I chose to use Google Maps instead of Cloudmade tiles because of latency issues in loading.

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Also written on this day..

• 2010: Humanizing Web Professionalism?
• 2004: Tinkering with the radio
• 2004: On the Spirit Mars Exploration Rover