Last week Chris McDowall informatics researcher from New Zealand hooked a computer up to the Twitter data firehose and, over the course of a day and a bit, grabbed every tweet that had geographic coordinates. I wrote a Python script to parse the 2GB of JSON files and used Matplotlib with the Basemap extension to animate 25 hours of data on a world map. The resulting animation plots over 530,000 tweets — and remember these are just tweets with geo-coordinates.
He recommend you full-screen this video, turn scaling off and high definition on. via Chris McDowall