Meteorite media impact

As part of a challange, we created a fascinating visualization exploring the media impact of meteorites on the web compared to their actual mass. Using data from popular search engines and social media platforms such as Google, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube, we determined the popularity of each meteorite and depicted their virtual impact.

The biggest challenge in creating this visualization was collecting the data from a wide range of internet media. We employed several tools like CasperJS, NodeJS, and PhantomJS to crawl Topsy’s Otter API, Twitter API, Flickr API, YouTube API, Google Results, and Bing Results. We then fused the data in a MongoDB to create a comprehensive dataset.

When selecting a particular meteorite on the visualization, viewers can see a detailed breakdown of its impact on the web, including related Tweets, Flickr photos, or YouTube videos. Overall, this project showcases the fascinating interplay between real-world events and their virtual counterparts, highlighting the potential of data visualization to provide insights into our online behavior.

More info at the GitHub repo. The project was done in collaboration with Luis Grass. I uploaded some screenshots of the process to my Flickr.