I found this article a little hard to digest at first. A lot of the tools used in the research I had no idea even existed and some of the terminology also drew blanks. But this reflects more on my lack of exposure to API's and Twitter than the article itself. I feel this article is valuable in that it exposes the ability of researches to drill down into the twitter sphere and its data, tapping into a global conversation. I was surprised to find out just how much and what kinds of information could be isolated from the global feed. This is also very useful because it made me begin to think about ways twitter data might be used. Like Jannicke mentions in his article summary the overall effect of this data mining results in 'temporal and geospatial content analysis'. The statistical ability to associate a percentage of twitter activity within separate countries was fascinating. The results surprised me in the sense that countries often highlighted as being less technologically advanced clearly find use for the technology just the same. For example, yes America is the highest tweet generator at 25% but in 3rd and 4th place was Indonesia with 12% and Brazil with 11% (Garaizar, Reips 2011, p. 636). This article does stray a little from the topic of 'Twitter and Political protest' but it does manage to contextualise the possible use of data after or during and event or protest. Overall the article really made me think about how and what online social data could reveal about our societies. It takes us one step closer to notions of a 'globalisation' when services like iScience Maps can literally put every tweet on the map.