From the post:
** Since I first released this tutorial in 2009, it has received thousands of views and has hopefully helped some of you get started with building projects incorporating Twitter with Processing. In late 2010, Twitter changed the way that authorization works, so I’ve updated the tutorial to get it inline with the new Twitter API functionality.
Accessing information from the Twitter API with Processing is (reasonably) easy. A few people have sent me e-mails asking how it all works, so I thought I’d write a very quick tutorial to get everyone up on their feet.
We don’t need to know too much about how the Twitter API functions, because someone has put together a very useful Java library to do all of the dirty work for us. It’s called twitter4j, and you can download it here. We’ll be using this in the first step of the building section of this tutorial.
Visualizing Twitter messages with Processing (graphics language) is good practice for any type of streaming data.
I really don’t understand the attraction of word clouds but know that many people like them. What I think would be cool would be what looks like a traditional index for browsing where the words darken based on their frequency in the stream of material and perhaps even have see-also entries. Imagine that with a feed from CiteSeer or the ACM.