Waiting at the Airport With the Rest of the Crowd? Tweet About It
BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, November 23 2010
PBS NewsHour has a project to use Twitter to crowdsource stories about Thanksgiving travel experiences.
PBS NewsHour and the Washington Post will monitor the #TSATime hashtag for information on wait times and anecdotes from travelers.
Their #TSATime initiative is really, really similar to FlyOnTime, an existing project to crowdsource airport security wait times that I wrote about last week.
When I contacted Josh Sulkin, the Ph.D student working on that project, he said he'd try and find a way to integrate the reports coming from #TSATime as well.
If anyone comes up with hard and fast information on whether this Thanksgiving travel season was more arduous than seasons past, it won't be from either of these initiatives. Both PBS and FlyOnTime lack crowdsourced data about wait times from prior years to compare to — while Sulkin's FlyOnTime initiative has been accepting submissions for over a year, he says that the only reliable data he has are from the last three months.
That said, Sulkin, after I asked him about it, has added a chart to his FlyOnTime site that shows airport security wait times, as reported using the Transportation Security Administration's own crowdsourced application and through Sulkin's mobile-enabled web application, over time. Here's what the last three months look like:
