The M5 Bus travels through New York City from Greenwich Village to the foot of the George Washington Bridge. Along the way it passes through several different sections of the city. I'm a recent arrival to the city and won't try to catalog each with a history and description I'm not familiar with. However, I can share my observations gathered during the trip.

Throughout the northbound bus route, I used the Twitter messaging service to broadcast real-time updates to anyone who desired to follow along. Each of these short messages, called "tweets", are marked with the time they were sent. The tweets were then mashed up with GPS data logged separately using common timestamps. The result is a geospatial and temporal record of my observations from the bus trip.

Often maps, or even photographs don't convey the feeling of neighborhoods. While I can't claim that a brief, passing moment observed from a moving bus can do better, there is something reassuring about reading messages that had been written at a certain place and time...it provides a human connection.

-Robert Carlsen, 11-29-2008