Cross posting here in case it can help connect with someone that might be able to help:
The problem with the geographical filtering is that very, very few tweets sent about the subject of the earthquake are geotagged.. as far as I can tell that is what twitter uses for the 'near: filter'.
For what its worth I set up this site http://chchneeds.org.nz immediately after the last big earthquake.. and it is still operating today. As a first step to finding tweets relevant to chch earthquake and filtering out spam it does also allow for filtering by address when people mention an actual address in the tweet.
For example if they say 'at 23 Maidavale lane' or 'in Sydenham' it tags those tweets as being in a particular suburb and in the region of canterbury. For example:
http://chchneeds.org.nz/#!/loc/canterbury
I had grander ideas for this but it was all about people in canterbury choosing to actively use the tags #offer and #need. When I realised that eq.org.nz and their volunteers were doing a better job of filtering and sorting (and getting their message out) than i put my time into helping them.
At this time eq.org.nz has been shut down as it does use quite a lot of volunteer hours to keep going, but everyone and anyone is welcome to try and use the data from chchneeds in anyway that they think it may helps. It's all open data made publically available of course. I'm @chchneeds on twitter if you want to get in touch with me.
Also for what its worth I also set up a similar service for the japanese earthquake, but was overwhelmed by the amount of data, and I wasn't keeping up so I had to shut it down. The new rate limiting rules from twitter don't help much with this.
Just want to add its really such a goddamn shame that spammers are doing this - basically polluting the public resource of ad-hoc hash tags with their probably automated choosing of popular hash tags. I do hope twitter finds a way to deal with this.
For what its worth I set up this site http://chchneeds.org.nz immediately after the last big earthquake.. and it is still operating today. As a first step to finding tweets relevant to chch earthquake and filtering out spam it does also allow for filtering by address when people mention an actual address in the tweet.
For example if they say 'at 23 Maidavale lane' or 'in Sydenham' it tags those tweets as being in a particular suburb and in the region of canterbury. For example: http://chchneeds.org.nz/#!/loc/canterbury
I had grander ideas for this but it was all about people in canterbury choosing to actively use the tags #offer and #need. When I realised that eq.org.nz and their volunteers were doing a better job of filtering and sorting (and getting their message out) than i put my time into helping them.
At this time eq.org.nz has been shut down as it does use quite a lot of volunteer hours to keep going, but everyone and anyone is welcome to try and use the data from chchneeds in anyway that they think it may helps. It's all open data made publically available of course. I'm @chchneeds on twitter if you want to get in touch with me.
Also for what its worth I also set up a similar service for the japanese earthquake, but was overwhelmed by the amount of data, and I wasn't keeping up so I had to shut it down. The new rate limiting rules from twitter don't help much with this.