Finding terms surrounding a trending hashtag?

Question

I'm looking for a way to find "sub-trends", or words that are trending beneath a larger trend. For instance, say "#foo" is the hashtag for a conference. Searching for "#foo" only gives you a general overview of what people are talking about -- if "#foo" moves too quickly, it becomes really difficult to track disparite conversations at #foo.

If "#bar" and "#abc" are two different sessions at "#foo", one can find more specific information by searching for "#foo #bar" or "#foo #abc"; yet, how would one find out about the existence of these surrounding hashtags, i.e., sub-trends?

If you look at the screenshot for Peoplebrowsr, there's a panel that looks for "words surrounding [trend]," which seems to be exactly what I'm looking for.

Is there a way to accomplish this more simply, i.e., without paying $149 /mo. for Peoplebrowsr?

Thanks!

Update: Another service that can do this is Twazzup (click for example). The "Community" panel has some limited info on surrounding words; is there a tool that does this, but with more detail?

Answer 1

There are several ways of doing this in code and 'not code'. I have documented a 'not code' approach using Yahoo Pipes here: Finding Common Terms around a Twitter Hashtag.

The recipe I describe in that post goes something like this:

• grab a list of tweets around a search term using the Twitter search API
• tokenise each tweet to generate a list of words contained within the tweets
• count the unique occurrences of each word
• strip out common words (the, and, to) etc
• order the remaining words by frequency of occurrence in the search returned tweets