Last days Virginia earthquake in the hashtag cloud
Yesterday, there was a minor earthquake in Virginia at about 1:51pm local time. Within minutes, the earthquake became the dominant topic on Twitter. In the following, we track the development of this topic based on a real-time analysis of hashtag activity on Twitter. Size of the node represents activity of the hashtag in retweets, links are set if hashtags occur in the same tweet. The hundred most active hashtags are visualized.
At about 1:45pm, we have the normal activity at Twitter. Big teamfollowback cluster, as well as the usual suspects, damnitstrue and so on. There’s also a smaller cluster which reflects the recent events in Libya.
At 2:03pm the earthquake cluster begins to pop up, still about the same activity as the other major topics. Note how it’s linked to the other topics through generic hashtags like cnn or fb (standing for facebook.)
By 2:30pm, earthquake is totally dominating the other topics (note how their activity has been scaled down in comparison). Also note how that cluster is linked to the Libya and teamfollowback cluster through generic nodes like socialmedia or twitter.
