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REAL LIFE NEWS: USING TWITTER TO CHECK THE WEATHER

by Hazed

What do you do if you want to know if it's raining? You probably look out of the window. Or, to find out the weather elsewhere, you'd turn to the weather forecast.

Scientists at the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Lab have come up with another way to do it. They look on Twitter.

This sounds completely barmy, but it's not. Not really. The maths professors have come up with "state of the art" algorithms to check tweets about a particular subject to get a picture of what's going on. As a test, they compared rain reports with location-tagged tweets mentioning keywords relating to rain.

They did the same with tweets about flu, compared to records from the National Health Service.

In both cases they discovered that the chat on social networks really does match what's occurring in real life. They think this could be helpful to pinpoint all kinds of useful things, so intend to continue their research.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/02/twitter_raining/

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