Legal Research

Twitter Venn

By Simon Fodden

Now that Twitter is reliably producing a large volume of verbiage on just about all topics imaginable, the task becomes one of extracting the desired fish from the flood — just as it was, and still is, with the larger web itself. The find and filter tools for Twitter are still in the making, and I thought it might be interesting for our Twitter users to take a look at one unusual tool, Twitter Venn.

We all remember our teachers or profs introducing us to Venn diagrams, those intersecting circular universes — well, Twitter Venn takes two or three search terms of your choice (can be phrases or multiple keywords) and shows you how often they’ve been mentioned on Twitter individually and in combination. The example I give below (click on it to enlarge) shows circles for court, blog and trial. In addition to the relative frequency of each term, you can see the frequency of daily use in the small chart to the right, and if you click within one of the segments you can see in a text cloud at the left all of the terms associated with the terms in the segment you chose.

Apart from its amusement value, Twitter Venn seems to a good tool for checking trends on Twitter. Because the data is displayed via a Java applet, and as a consequence no URL is created for your particular Venn as a routine matter, if you want to bookmark your diagram or fix it in some way, you need a way to create the missing URL. There’s a “Show URL” button that should do just that, but I couldn’t get it to work — perhaps something to do with my being on a Mac. At any event, it’s fairly easy to create a URL by hand, if you need one: just add ?q= and your search terms to the base URL. So for the illustrated Venn diagram above the URL would be
http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterVenn/view.php?q=court,blog,trial

There’s also a handy explanatory page that should make things much clearer than I have.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on May 06, 2009 (boomark / email).