Al Jazeera Launches Twitter Dashboard To Track Uprisings in Egypt, Yemen, Libya & Bahrain

Sarah Kessler

Sana'a- Mar 8, 2011- Qatar-based news outlet Al Jazeera has launched a Twitter dashboard to illustrate tweets about uprisings and revolutions around the world.

The dashboard tallies the daily number of tweets about developments in each listed country (the site is currently tracking Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain) and shows the average number of such tweets per minute for each country. It also graphs the number of such tweets from each country over time and shows a visual representation of the “hashtag distribution for each country getting the most attention in the Twittersphere.”

Al Jazeera has led the world’s media coverage of protests and revolutions throughout the Middle East and Africa. Some have called the uprisings the news network’s “CNN moment.” (CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War is largely responsible for launching its current popularity, much the same way current events have catapulted Al Jazeera’s standing.)

But considering other projects such as Iamjan25.com, real-time tweet visualizer HyperCities Egypt and other news organizations’ interactive maps of real-time tweets from the same areas, it seems as though Al Jazeera was uncharacteristically late to this idea.

Even so, the dashboard provides a handy, at-a-glance gauge of where and how people are using Twitter to discuss uprisings in the Middle East and the Arab world.

Source: Mashable