This has got to be the coolest data visualization I've seen yet coming out of the Twitterverse. It's also one of the smartest product placement moves I've ever seen a traditional company do online. (A glance at Tropicana's...
Barack Obama probably used the word "hope" more than any other, calling himself a "hope-monger," not a fear-monger. Here's some interesting evidence that his rise to power is making a lot of people hopeful: Moodgrapher is a site that plots the mood levels reported by LiveJournal users in their posts during the last few days, updated every 10 minutes. LiveJournal is one of the world's largest blogger communities, with some 1.8 million active users, and the tool enables people to select from dozens of terms to describe their current mood. Moodgrapher tracks both the absolute counts and the rate of change. Take a look at how their level of hope has changed: There's also a big jump among LiveJournal users in...
What happens to Obama's network after the election? The answer depends a lot on decisions Obama and his top aides will make, but thanks to the lateral networking tools available to everyone online, the answer to that question is also up to his base, and the organizers and grass-roots leaders who are the nodes of his network. Thursday, I'm going to be speaking on a panel with Al Giordano of The Field and Nate Silver of 538, that Al has put together called "The Organizing of the President,/a>," where we'll offer some thoughts on this topic. (More details on exact location soon, but I think it's 7pm somewhere on the DePauw University campus). But, as expected, the answers are also...
I think this picture says it pretty clearly. In the last two weeks, Barack Obama has gained nearly 400,000 new friends on Facebook, a 20% increase in that short period of time. Wow. I guess the surge is working....
It's been clear for some time that the McCain campaign is way behind the Obama campaign in all kinds of social media metrics. Obama has more that twice as many unique visitors to his website (not a good sign if you assume that a good deal of this traffic is coming from last-minute deciders), four times as many views of his YouTube videos, four times as many friends on MySpace, four times as many friends on Facebook, etc. But maybe all that webby stuff doesn't matter as much as the ability to turn out the troops on the ground. But in that respect, I've also been struck by what seems to be a big imbalance in the two campaigns'...
Courtesy the good folks at Google, we've got a real-time election results map. It has separate layers for Presidential, House and Senate races, showing results down to the county level. The map updates in real time as the AP posts votes, and shows data at the county level if you zoom in, or at the state level if you're zoomed out. For the presidential race, it also be keeping track of the electoral count as states are called for one candidate or the other....
We've been arguing for a while here on techPresident that the candidate who best used the internet to enable his supporters to join in co-creating the campaign would have a big edge come November. Now we're seeing what Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, called the rise of the "long tail of politics": tremendous metrics as the Obama get-out-the-vote operation goes into the final stretch. Some examples: -In just the last three weeks, reports Amy Hamblin, Obama supporters using myBO created 50,000 new campaign events, on top of the 150,000 they had initiated in the previous 18 months. -The campaign now counts 27,000 groups formed on myBO. -More than 13.3 million individual voter contacts so far, according to a conference call last night with...
Valdis Krebs, whose social network maps of the relationships between political book purchasers on Amazon have periodically graced our pixels, has a new post up taking one last look at the shifting patterns that can be discovered by looking at the list of top-selling political books and tracing which other political books are also popular among those book-buyers, and you will be surprised by what he has found. The biggest news, in my personal opinion, is his discovery that buyers of popular conservative titles--books like Obama Nation and Liberal Fascism--are also buying Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky's seminal work on community organizing! (Technically, Krebs data shows that buyers of Alinsky's work are also highly likely to buy the other two titles,...
The election is a week away, but two new online projects were just launched focusing on involving the public in what comes next. BigDialog.org and Whitehouse2.org are complimentary efforts that seek to crowd-source the process of putting pressing questions before the President-elect and identifying the top priorities of the public. We don't know yet if the next President will join in and respond, but if these sites garner a lot of participation, he'd be wise to pay attention. BigDialog's "Ask the President-Elect" is a project of the Massachusetts-based eCitizen Foundation, the MIT eCitizen Architecture Program, Dave Colarusso's CommunityCounts, techPresident.com, the OpenDebate coalition, and a growing list of academics, bloggers, nonprofits and e-communities. The site builds on our experience during the primaries...
