VMA. Tweet Tracker
Here are some screenshots and photos taken during yesterday's music awards ceremony at Radio City Music Hall.
Radian6 polled twitter data in real time, searching for MTV, VMA, and a few other event-related terms, as well as the names of all the celebrities that we knew would be at the event. The idea was to provide a rolling snapshot of activity that we would use to build a real-time visualization of who was being talked about at the awards, as well as what people were saying about them. Not surprisingly, just before the event, by far the dominant character was "MTV" itself:
For the first hour and a half, things went pretty much as expected. Celebrities arrived, walked down the red carpet, preened, and went into the venue, and you could see their twitter traffic rise and fall accordingly. Fans noticed that Pink and Shakira were wearing the same dress, you could see this reflected in the keywords about those two celebrities, and their charts started going up and down at about the same rate – below, somewhere between 10 and 50 tweets every 30 seconds, which if you think about it, is kind of a lot.
At around 9:25, Taylor Swift accepted the award for best female video – her line is the red one on the bottom of the screen below, and you can see it just jump to 2261 in 30 seconds – which again is kind of a lot. Kanye West, who hadn't yet stormed the stage & taken the microphone from her, was at about 8 tweets every 30 seconds.
Immediately afterwards, Kanye's #'s shot through the roof, to almost 5000 tweets in 30 seconds, and remained upwards of 2000 tweets every 30 seconds for most of the night. Note that the keywords associated with Kanye were at this point still fairly benign: "love," "performance," etc.
Via Stamen
