About me
I’m a digital strategist who’s been working with the web for over eleven years. My professional background includes consultancy, research, UX design, information architecture, content strategy and business analysis.
But even though it’s nearly ten years since I actually did any coding, I still approach my work from the perspective of a technologist. A basic understanding of the platforms and technologies making up today’s internet is essential for anyone hoping to do anything interesting or novel with it.
Today I work as head of strategy & user experience at London-based interactive agency Tobias & Tobias. I work closely with many large, globally renowned clients and draw upon my broad experience to help them make the most of digital while making sure my company’s internal culture is creative, competent and curious about change. But what I enjoy most is contributing ideas to products and services that capitalise on emerging aspects of the modern web.
On this blog you’ll mainly find links, opinion pieces and the odd bit of original research. I don’t post about client projects very often due to confidentiality agreements. If you’d like to know more about what I do, or just want to exchange some views with me, just get in touch via my @brelson Twitter account.
February 18, 2010 - 1:27 am
Hi,
Have read your excellent article on Using Google Spreadsheets to extract Twitter data.
Question I have is where do you get the twitter categories from, eg tweet_from_user, items author etc.
I am looking to insert a location category ie where the tweet user is located.
Grateful for your reply.
Adrian
March 10, 2010 - 10:16 pm
Thanks for your feedback about the article, I’m glad you found it useful. The Twitter categories come from the data returned by the Twitter API – when you request search results, Twitter gives you a bit of data about each result including the name of the author. More info about the Twitter API can be found here: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-Search-API-Method:-search
I think it would be possible to add the user’s location, but a bit more work with Google Spreadsheets would be needed because that information doesn’t come out of the “search” API method. You’d need to run a second query for each username, which could be a bit difficult, but I will look into it!
May 14, 2010 - 7:43 pm
Hi,
Love your spreadsheet to do the extract of twitter. On the last tab, the one that does the more pages, it is stopping at 100 rows as well. Do you have a suggestion how to get the full list?
May 19, 2010 - 5:45 pm
Hey Garen,
Glad you find the spreadsheet useful! I’ve updated it so that on the “more pages” tab you’ll see another 20 rows appearing.
You can add more rows basically by making the spreadsheet request more pages from Twitter. If you look at the formula in, say, cell B102, you’ll see that the query string has a page number in it (“page=11″). If you copy this formula and paste it further down the spreadsheet with the page number incremented (“page=12″), you should see even more results appearing. You’ll need to do the same for the formulas in each of the columns to make sure you bring in timestamp, username and tweet text too. Let me know if it works!