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!