The code is open-source and available on Github.
Discussion on Hacker News

As a first blog post, I decided to describe a way to detect first stories (a.k.a new events) on Twitter as they happen.  This work is part of the Thesis I wrote last year for my MSc in Computer Science in the University of Edinburgh.You can find the document here.

Every day, thousands of posts share information about news, events, automatic updates (weather, songs) and personal information. The information published can be retrieved and analyzed in a news detection approach. The immediate spread of events on Twitter combined with the large number of Twitter users prove it suitable for first stories extraction. Towards this direction, this project deals with a distributed real-time first story detection (FSD) using Twitter on top of Storm. Continue Reading