It's useful to filter out "conversational" tweets and look for tweets with links to another page or picture, etc.

We create a view that only map tweets with link entities.

import couchdb
from couchdb.design import ViewDefinition
import sys

def url_tweets_by_created_at(doc):
    if doc.get('created_at'):
        _date = doc['created_at']
    else:
        _date = 0 # Jan 1 1970

    if doc.get('entities') and doc['entities'].get('urls') 
      and len(doc['entities']['urls']):
        if doc.get('user'):
            yield (_date, doc)

view = ViewDefinition('index', 'daily_url_tweets', 
                      url_tweets_by_created_at, language='python')
view.sync(db)

Next we create an app that reads from this view and displays the results.

import couchdb
from datetime import datetime

def run(db, date, limit=10):
    """Query a couchdb view for tweets. Sort in memory by follower count.
    Return the top 10 tweeters and their tweets"""
    print "Finding top %d tweeters"%limit

    dt = datetime.strptime(date,"%Y-%m-%d")
    stime=int(time.mktime(dt.timetuple()))
    etime=stime+86400-1
    tweeters = {}
    tweets = {}
    # get screen_name, follower_counts and tweet ids for looking up later
    for row in db.view('index/daily_url_tweets', startkey=stime, endkey=etime):
        status = row.value
        screen_name = status['user']['screen_name']
        followers_count = status['user']['followers_count']
        tweeters[screen_name] = int(followers_count)
        if not tweets.has_key(screen_name):
            tweets[screen_name] = []
        tweets[screen_name].append(status['id_str'])

    # sort
    print len(tweeters.keys())
    di = tweeters.items()
    di.sort(key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)
    out = {}
    for i in range(limit):
        screen_name = di[i][0]
        followers_count = di[i][1]
        out[screen_name] = {}
        out[screen_name]['follower_count'] = followers_count
        out[screen_name]['tweets'] = {}
        # print i,screen_name,followers_count
        for tweetid in tweets[screen_name]:
            status = db[tweetid]
            text = status['orig_text']
            # print tweetid,orig_text
            urls = status['entities']['urls']
            #name = status['user']['name']
            for url in urls:
                text = text.replace(url['url'],url['expanded_url'])
            out[screen_name]['tweets'][tweetid] = text

    return out

server = couchdb.Server('http://localhost:5984')
db = server[dbname]
date = '2012-03-05'
output = run(db, date)

Find the complete codebase on github at: https://github.com/telvis07/twitter_mining