Meteorite Media Impact
A visualization comparing meteorites' physical mass with their online media impact across search and social platforms.
When a meteorite strikes, it leaves two craters: one in the ground and one on the internet. This visualization compares the physical mass of meteorites with their media impact on the web — how much attention each strike generated across Google, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.
The hard part was the data. To measure each meteorite’s virtual footprint, we crawled Topsy’s Otter API, the Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube APIs, and Google and Bing results using CasperJS, PhantomJS, and Node.js, then fused everything in a MongoDB into one comparable dataset.
Selecting a meteorite shows the anatomy of its online impact — related tweets, Flickr photos, YouTube videos — and lets you hold the two craters side by side: physical mass on one axis, public attention on the other.
Built with Luis Grass as part of a challenge; the code is on GitHub and some process screenshots are on Flickr.
