NYT Maps Super Bowl Tweets

The New York Times is doing a great deal to draw in the internet audience to nytimes.com and this map mashup is terrific.  They tracked Super Bowl related words by Twitter users and mapped them based on location word cloud style.  You can browse different sets of words, as well as view the timeline of how they changed throughout the game.

Above is a shot of the “player names” tweet group, so as more people in a specific region Tweeted about a specific player name, the size of the name grows.  This shot is from just after Larry Fitzgerald scored his second touchdown, giving Arizona a temporary three point lead in the fourth quarter.

This is really well done, but in the end, its just another “cool trick” to bring people to a site.  This really serves no purpose as far as newsworthiness.  There are still millions of people out there that don’t know or care about Twitter.  That being said, I think it is really cool to play around with for a while, but in the end what is it accomplishing?