I’ve started to feel the intellectual wanderlust of the long month between the end of exams and the beginning of next semester. I’ve got two ambitious projects for the Comparative Law Project, but I need to be doing something for my own edification, and less for my resume’s “research experience” heading. I’ve been thinking it over for a while, and I think I’ve found exactly what I’m looking for.
Atlanta Traffic is Terrible. Fortunately, regular radio reports throughout the rush hours (basically constant in Atlanta) keep me off the highways and on the side roads. But not everyone is so adventuresome. So for all of you with iPhones or whatnot, I’ve decided to parse out all the relevant information from Twitter and publish it to a Google map.
Oh, wait, that job is already done for me. They even link to a Yahoo map. Or Not. Which got me thinking–isn’t this a perfect project for Yahoo Pipes? Well, I don’t actually have a Yahoo account, and I have no interest in creating one. If only Google had some equivalent… Like Google Mashup Editor! Haha! Oh, wait, they killed it. But wait! There’s a successor to Google Mashup Editor: Google App Engine! Now, All I need to do is sit down and pick whether to write it in Java or Python…
By the way, I’m looking for sources of Atlanta Traffic information on Twitter. Parsing stuff out of atlantatraffic will be child’s play, and GA_Traffic won’t be much more of a problem. And It’s awfully nice of the City_of_Atlanta to tweet road closures ahead of time. On the other hand, #atltraffic will be a beastly piece of work to get anything out of. Hello machine learning techniques?
Can anybody else think of a good way to get other Atlanta Traffic information out of Twitter?
