Understanding the Spatio-temporal Pattern of Tweets

September 2013 769 Recent IT technologies and online services are tremendously altering the way people create, use and share geographic information (Elwood, 2008). Enabled by the widespread use of hand-handled GPS, geo-tags, high-resolution graphics and access to the Internet and Web 2.0, spatial data can be collected and produced voluntarily by the untrained general public. This has been termed Geoweb, Volunteered Geographic Information, and neogeography (Goodchild, 2007; Crampton, 2008). Different from the traditional way exclusive to professionals in collecting spatial data, an individual can be seen as an intelligent sensor contributing to local geographic information (Goodchild, 2007). This innovation profoundly impacts the discipline of geography, as well as sociology and politics, by providing innovative solutions other than traditional methods such as focus groups, interviews and surveys (Elwood, 2008; Tsou and Leitner, 2013). The Geoweb, according to Crampton et al. (2013), is not only a simple collection of latitude-longitude coordinates attached with information, but a “socially produced space that blurs the oft-reproduced binary of virtual and material spaces”. i n t r o d u c t i o n Understanding the