If you're looking for social media information based around a specific area there are very few options available to you. You can use the Advanced Twitter search option, but of course that's limited to tweets. I've been playing around with an engine that I've just discovered called Echosec. The idea is very straightforward - choose the area that interests you by creating a square on the world map, and Echosec will then display the tweets and Flickr images that are from that area. You can also choose the time period that interests you as well.
This is a really useful tool if you need real time content from a particular place (great to keep right up to speed with a breaking story or event), you can get faster breaks on a story, so it's perfect if you're a journalist. There are two versions of the engine - the free one, which is limited to tweets and Flickr images, and the paid for version which increases the sources that you can view, such as video from YouTube.
There were a few disadvantages to the engine - the main one being that there didn't seem to be any sort of safe search filtering - I found a lot of adult/pornographic images that had been posted to twitter, and there didn't seem to be a way of not seeing them. I also got all of the tweets first, and then the images, so if I was after pictures that would have been more scrolling. However, I accept that you have to display material one way or another, but it would be nice to have the option. It wasn't possible to limit the results by using keywords either - this would be a real advantage, because you may only want to follow one type of story, and the ability to limit by hashtag would be very powerful.
Those limitations aside, it's worth a look.
Comments