#uksnow - plotting Tweets on a map

The UK is currently having its once every ten years snowfall. Like many places that rarely get snow, this is not only a big deal, but makes travel near impossible. There will be SUVs littering the ditches by day break.. What has been interesting is watching how social media reports this - one person has taken this further and is plotting tweets of snow reports - users tweet their postcode and on a scale of 0 to 10, how much snow is coming down.

While it a great example of what can be done with clever programing and social media, especially during an unusual event, the actual visualization produced isn't very useful - there's no indication of the age of the tweets - i.e. whether this reflects the last 10 minutes or the last day. This is important especially when the data will vary greatly from hour to hour - "how much snow is falling now".

When data is plotted that has any time component, you need to indicate the 'freshness' and the 'aging'. Also, there isn't any normalization for number of users - so London looks like a hot bed of snow activity. If this were something more serious, a better way to represent this would be to break the country down into less discrete areas (e.g. counties), and color these based on snow reports, rather than plotting individual tweets. This would reduce the influence that number of tweets has on the look of the map. Areas where there was no data would have to be able to be distinguished from areas of no snow.

 Even better would be to have an animate option where you could watch the progress of snow fronts across the country over the last day. Still, I like it - imagine doing this with power outages during an ice storm (updates via phones I suppose), progress of wild fires, etc. There could be some really useful information as long as enough people take part.