A new "tweet map" created by Microsoft researcher and social media expert Andrés Monroy-Hernández reveals, in the style of "Ork Posters," what each Seattle neighborhood is like in the twitter-sphere. Geekwire has the story here.

In the Geekwire story, Monroy-Hernández explains a bit about how he came up with the tweet map, which is based on volume of tweets.

"Since it’s volume driven, the neighborhoods with low activity are over-represented by tweets from the police department. So it was partly provocative, to say: ‘hey, not everyone is tweeting at the same rate.’ We extracted all the tweets of people whose profile says they live in Seattle in a period of two months. We got a list of each neighborhood in Seattle, then we identified tweets by neighborhood using specific keywords — for example “cap hill,” “capitol hill,” even misspellings like ”capital hill.” Then once we had a data set for each neighborhood, we then combined neighborhoods that were very close to each other, such as Montlake and Capitol Hill, so that the visuals were easier to read."

So, what is Ballard like? Well, there seems to be a lot of vague, so-so words, like "car," "day," "back," "old" and "bus." Snore.

And then for some reason there's "Wallingford." (!?!?!?)

But a few might be explained (and might have been created by our Twitter handle). "Power" and "outage" could refer to either the recent power outage in Green Lake or the massive one in December that was the result of a seagull kamikaze-ing into the powerlines on NW Market St. "Boys" and "basketball" probably refers to the Ballard High School's boys basketball team. And "study" and transit" most likely refers to the Ballard-Downtown transit study which is now underway, and which just had a big event thrown by Seattle Transit Blog at Hale's Ales Brewery last week.

Now, we aren't taking all the credit for these tweets, but maybe we helped out a little bit. In a shameless self plug, you can follow us on both Facebook and Twitter, the links to which you can find below.

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