But how can we objectively measure and compare the scale of such things?

A little while ago I got thinking about this when a Los Angeles earthquake was being measured in tweets per second rather than using the Richter Scale.

And now here is my solution, the Magnitwude Calculator, which measures the current magnitude of tweets on any topic within any location.

Please have a fiddle. Type in a search term or select from the autocomplete list of currently trending topics, move the map around, and tell me what you think:

You can link directly to the Magnitwude Calculator at http://hitching.net/magnitwude