Earthquakes and Twitter

This is a neat-o article about the US Geological Survey using linguistic data from twitter to get initial information on "tremblors." The San Francisco Chronicle reports:


"There is usually a lag between when an earthquake strikes and when researchers can analyze the data that floods in from seismic stations. During that gap, scientists combing through hundreds of tweets can get an initial picture of where the shaking was felt and areas of potential damage.

A prototype system aggregates tweets based on key words such as "earthquake" or the equivalent in different languages. It can then send an e-mail listing the cities where the tweets came from and what the tweets said."