It’s about 4 or 5 PM last Thursday, and I’m sitting on my couch at home suffering from a low grade fever of 101 degrees, and a thought occurs to me. Well, it’s the thought illustrated in my little diagram above. I always tend to think of data, and how it can be used through a marketing filter. This is my first of many problems. In order to try and understand the diagram above, I had to forget those thoughts…at least for a few hours.

We now can bring three seemingly unconnected, but readily available data points together, and look for connections in a whole new layer. Are there implications, or will anything be on the other side? I’m trying to get my small brain to wrap around something much larger than I can swallow. I guess what I’m trying to peer into, is a collective consciousness, and how it relates to real world events.

Step 1. Gather Twitter api search feed.
Step 2. Utilize GPS coordinates for tweets that have them, or sub in location profile data for those that don’t have GPS data.
Step 3. Parse each 140 character tweet for emotional trigger word and give a value (this will be tricky, and pretty loose)
Step 4. Use open source heat map API synced with Google Maps API to visualize impact
Step 5. Start looking for patterns with real world events (I have a few ideas on this)
Step 6. Determine if the patterns prove out over multiple occurences

Well, that’s as far as I have gone. What are your thoughts?