If you are watching the MTV Video Music Awards right now, chances are that either you or someone you know is also Tweeting about it. Some trending topics on Twitter right now are “lip synching” (Oh, Bieber) and “Drake better win”. But if you want to supplement your watching during commercials, open your laptop and point it to the MTV VMA Twitter Tracker. It is a gorgeous visualization of VMA-related Tweets created by MTV, Twitter, and the excellent folks at Stamen Design (who have also done visualizations for Digg and Crimespotting sites).
As of this writing, there are 1.3 million Tweets about the MTV VMAs in the past three hours since it started. The Twitter tracker ranks artists by number of Tweets per minute. At one point, Taylor Swift was dominating with 3,517 Tweets per minute, followed by Kanye West (3,009) and Lady Gaga (857). It changes all the time, obviously, depending on who is on stage.
When you go to the VMA Twitter tracker, you see pictures of the top four most-tweeted about artists with a cascade of little gray bozes falling over their faces. Each box is a representative Tweet, which you can click on to read. For example, here is one I found on the tracker by @HipHopSince93:
Thanks to my Ex I’m pretty familiar with Taylor Swift. (Not that I wanna be).
Thumbnails along the top of the tracker let you click on down the line to other artists. All in all, it is very entertaining, almost more so than the VMAs themselves.
MTV Networks, a division of Viacom, is one of the world’s leading creators of entertainment content, with brands that engage and connect diverse audiences across television, online, mobile, games, virtual worlds and consumer products. The company’s portfolio spans more than 150 television channels and 400 digital media properties worldwide, and includes MTV, VH1, CMT, Logo, Harmonix, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Nick Jr., TeenNick, AddictingGames, Shockwave, Neopets, COMEDY CENTRAL, SPIKE, TV Land, Atom, GameTrailers and Xfire.
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
Stamen was founded by Eric Rodenbeck in 2001. In 2003 Michal Migurski joined the studio for the start of our ongoing collaboration with BMW and DesignworksUSA. Since then, the studio has grown to a staff of seven, and is establishing a reputation for its expertise in creating compelling interactive design and data visualization projects.
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