Al Jazeera has created a Twitter Dashboard to illustrate what is being tweeted about in the Middle East, and about where. The Qatar-based news organisation has attracted international attention for its coverage of the Middle East protests and revolutions, during which it had the advantage of being already well-installed in the region.

As well as a Twitter stream of all tweets about Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain, the dashboard shows the total number of tweets sent that day about each of these countries, and the average number of tweets per minute. It also graphs the number of tweets about these countries in the last hour.

Today, Libya is by far the most talked about, with an average of 90 tweets a minute at the time of writing, compared to about 50 for Egypt, 15 for Bahrain and 5 for Yemen.

The dashboard also shows the distribution of keywords (hashtags) in tweets about each country.

The scale of the graph is not very clear, and the Twitter stream moves so fast that it can be difficult to follow, but overall the dashboard provides a useful resource for getting an overview of what people are talking about on Twitter in the region.

Twitter and other social media have been hailed as a force to be reckoned with in the Middle Eastern struggles against repressive governments. Al Jazeera has made full use of Twitter during the Middle Eastern protests, including using promoted tweets and trends for publicity in the US where it is barely available on television.

Source: Mashable