Bike-o-Meter Now Without Paris/Dublin/Brussels/Valencia/Seville/ Vienna and Toyama

The world of data is changing, vast amounts of free and open data are enabling innovative visualisations. Our new Bike-o-Meter could be seen as a case in point, it provides at a glance a view of how bicycle rental schemes in cities around the world are performing. It even allows you to view the percentage of hire bikes that would need to be redistributed to balance each scheme and here may lie the problem - it allows under performing cities to be clearly identified using their own data.

Sadly a number of cities, run by a common provider, have requested that we no longer use their data, stating use protection under the harmonised sui generis database right, as provided under Directive 96/9/EC: Chapter III Article 7 (1) and (2).

Below is how the Bike-o-Meter used to look:

We are of course happy to accept the request and as a result Paris/Dublin/Brussels/Valencia/Seville/ Vienna and Toyama are now sitting with empty dials. This is disappointing to say the least, we would be happy to add these cities back in but as ever with data its down to the providers...

Got a view? #bikeometer on Twitter.

Tweet-o-Meter adds San Francisco, Barcelona, Tokyo and Oslo to its Data Mine: Urban Tweets per Minute

Due to various emails asking 'where is xxx' we have added four more cities to the Tweet-o-Meter which means more data to collect and analyse. Is it true that, New York is the city that never sleeps? Do Londoners send more Tweets than New Yorkians'? Is Oslo a bigger Tweeter than Munich? Is Tokyo into Tweets as much as Barcelona? Has San Francisco calmed down after that
Apple Event?


The Tweet-o-Meter measures the amount of tweets (measured in Tweets per Minute or TPM) received from various locations around the world. The gauges are updated every second giving you a live view of the TPM's in each location.

Tweet-o-Meter is designed to mine data for later analysis relating to furthering our understanding of social and temporal dynamics for e-Social Science within the Twitter demographic. The system is under development here at CASA as part of a wider survey tool as part of the NeISS project in association with Urban Tick and coded by Steven Gray.

See yesterdays introduction to Tweet-o-Meter post for full details and the music video behind the original choice of cities or head direct to the Eight Cities Head-to Head Tweet-o-Meter Page.

New York, London, Paris, Munich: Tweets Per Minute via our new Tweet-o-Meter

‘New York, London, Paris, Munich everybody talk about Pop Musik’ – that was 1979 and the catch line by the group M. As such we thought it would be interesting to mine what people are talking about in 2010.

We are planning to log all geolocated Tweets in NewYork, London, Paris and Munich over a 24 hour period via the Twitter API as part of research under the NeISS project in association with UrbanTick and ourselves here at Digital Urban, part of CASA, University College London.


The system is running in beta mode over the next week with visualisation of the Tweets per Minute provided via our Tweet-o-Meter. While the reference to the 1979 is all well and good the system is actually designed to mine data for later analysis relating to further our understanding of the social and temporal dynamics of cities within the Twitter demographic. These can be mapped allowing us to capture 24 hours in the life of the city.

Below is an example of the type of base output we expect, as we are also extracting the social data and retweets we can map this in both time and space. UrbanTick has a nice tutorial on how to the do the timelapse of Tweets below:

London Weekend on Twitter from urbanTick on Vimeo.

Currently in beta mode the Tweet-o-Meter updates every 10 seconds displaying the city with the highest number of Tweets, the logged 24 hour period will be announced next week. Once collected we will be able to create city maps detailing the Tweet activity over time and space, a wider ranging system will be launched as part of a free data collection service via NeISS in the next couple of months.


See http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/tom/ to view New York, London, Paris, Munich via Tweet-o-Meter and if your in one of those cities and want to take part, simply make sure you have geolocation turned on in your Twitter preferences.

For those too young or perhaps simply nostalgic for the late 70's/early 80's hit that inspired the work, here is PopMusik via YouTube (its great...).