Data mining with Ruby and Twitter. In October 2008, like many others, I created a Twitter account out of curiosity.
Like most people, I connected with friends and did some random searching to better understand the service. Communicating at 140 characters didn't seem like an idea that would be popular. An unrelated event helped me understand Twitter's real value. In early July 2009, my web-hosting provider went dark. How to Make an Interactive Network Visualization. Networks!
They are all around us. The universe is filled with systems and structures that can be organized as networks. Recently, we have seen them used to convict criminals, visualize friendships, and even to describe cereal ingredient combinations. We can understand their power to describe our complex world from Manuel Lima's wonderful talk on organized complexity. A Physicist in Wall Street. The R Project for Statistical Computing. Processing.js. Processing.org.