{"id":154898,"date":"2010-01-08T14:27:58","date_gmt":"2010-01-08T19:27:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=90375"},"modified":"2010-01-08T14:27:58","modified_gmt":"2010-01-08T19:27:58","slug":"%e2%80%9ci-felt-that%e2%80%9d-usgs-leverages-earthquake-tweets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/154898","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI Felt That\u201d: USGS Leverages Earthquake Tweets"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n

Earthquakes are the perfect Twitter phenomenon. You feel something weird, you want to share it and confirm it with the world. That’s what happened yesterday<\/a> in the San Francisco Bay Area, when we experienced a 4.1 quake centered near Milpitas.<\/p>\n

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Tweets about the Jan. 7 earthquake near Mipitas, Calif.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It’s such a canonical example that Twitter CEO Evan Williams used it in a recent blog post<\/a> about Twitter improving its location integration. “As a dramatic example, twittering ‘Earthquake!’ alone is not as informative as ‘Earthquake!’ coupled with your current location.”<\/p>\n

The forward-thinking scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey want to figure out what they can do with this user-contributed data, and to that end have started the Twitter Earthquake Detection Program<\/a> using funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (found via Ecopolitology<\/a> via The Business Insider<\/a>). They look for earthquake-related keywords and map them to locations, filtering out tweets about Dairy Queen\u2019s Earthquake brownie desserts, for example.<\/p>\n