Ignoring the non-English speaking world online means missing out on a very large, and rapidly growing portion of the internet. From the very first day we launched Trendsmap, the most common request we received was to track trends across the globe in languages other than English. It has been a little while now since we have made a significant change to Trendsmap, but we are excited to be closing in on a new release which will be the first step in achieving greater internationalisation.
Recently we did a trial in conjunction with the National TV broadcaster in the Netherlands, NOS during the recent national municipal elections there. Part of their election coverage including monitoring social media sites, including twitter, and in turn they used Trendsmap to identify local trends across the country during the election. For this to work we had to include Dutch tweets in the trends extraction, the result being a specialised version that showed Dutch & English trends from the Netherlands.
As part of the next step we are looking at including Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese on Trendsmap. Other languages would progressively follow thereafter. Also included in this beta version are a number of other enhancements including better word placement, and enhanced resolution of the map (you will be able to zoom in a bit more).
Here are some screen shots giving a good indication of the change it makes when you use tweets from the ‘local’ languages to generate trends.
This first image is from the current site showing the Netherlands :
This second one from our development version of the site shows the trends for the same region and time, but also using Dutch tweets to generate trends :
On a side note, if any geeky types out there happen to be heading to the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, WhereCamp in Mountain View, or Twitter’s Chirp Conference in San Francisco in the coming weeks, then please get in touch. We are heading over from Australia, and will otherwise be in San Francisco for the period, and would love to meet up whilst there.
^JB
