Unfortunately, geo-tagging in the Twitter API is still hardly ever used -- in almost 100,000 #AskObama tweets, less than 500 of them were tagged. At the same ti

Unfortunately, geo-tagging in the Twitter API is still hardly ever used -- in almost 100,000 #AskObama tweets, less than 500 of them were tagged. At the same time we felt that location was an interesting metric, since the country is often politically divided along state lines. The time zone is the best compromise we had. It's not perfect, but the fact that the numbers match the "stereotypes" shows there's at least some merit to this approximation. Glad you liked the word cloud at least -- I've gotta say, you've been our toughest viewer so far ;) Thanks for the feedback though.