Friday, May 13, 2011

Visualizing the Spread of Breaking News

Here's an interesting visualization showing how fast news of Osama bin Laden's death spread on Twitter. It follows the original Tweet of Keith Urbahn, the chief of staff for the former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. From there, you can see how the news propagated from network to network.

What I found most interesting is the use of nodes and lines to represent the Twitter network. It doesn't offer practical technical information (you can't really count all of the nodes) , but it allows you to really grasp how large social networks can be and how interconnected we all are when it comes to the spread of news.





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1 comment:

  1. JessicaMay 17, 2011 at 5:57 PM

    I like the use of color in this chart. The white translucent effect makes it easier to see where a cluster of lines are all bunched up so they don't end up just looking like one big, white line.

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