Congratulations to Cole Gillespie!

[Tyler Dukes]

I meant to say something about this a little while back, but congratulations to forum member Cole Gillespie, who was named a runner up at TimesOpen: Hack Day a few weeks back. Here's what the NYT's Brad Stenger had to say about Cole's project in his Hack Day recap:

finden, was another Twitter location mashup by Cole Gillespie, a Mozilla-Knight Foundation fellow working on computational journalism at Zeit, a German news organization. Gillespie used node.js and socket.io for near real-time mapping of Twitter messages, setting them in the box a user draws on a Web map. It will also be possible to further investigate the tweets by keyword. The Twitter API allows 400 such keywords in addition the bounding boxes used to specify map areas. The next step for the project, according to Gillespie, is to tie the location data to keywords for New York Times articles using the new Geo API.

Check out Cole's GitHub page, where you can dive a little deeper into the code behind finden and some of his other work.

Cole, was there anything else you wanted to share about your project or Hack Day in general?

[cole gillespie]

Thanks. I was sent to the NYT as a representative of the Mozilla Foundation. The goal for me was to try and show the success of open source in the news room and how valuable open source collaboration can be. I just want to give a big thanks to the people at Mozilla for putting their faith in my ideas and programming experience. If it was not for them I would not have had this opportunity.