Today residents of Illinois' 5th congressional district are voting on a replacement for Rahm Emmanuel. About a week ago, we built and launched a twitter buzz tracker to let folks see how the front runners stacked up on the popular micoblogging service.
Anytime a front runner is mentioned by name by a non-campaign twitter account, the tracker picks it up and adds it to the running line graph at the top of the page.
Hovering over the graph creates a breakdown of how each day went in the race across Twitter: who was mentioned the most, keywords from election-related tweets and articles linked to from election-related tweets.
Then down below, a tabbed reader lets you get the latest tweets about each candidate with a 5-minute delay.
Reception for the tracker has been really positive. One of Slate's bloggers just linked over to it today and last week all the local sites did.
The great thing about this is how re-useable the code is for other big stories. You could see which Lollapalooza bands are getting the most buzz during the festival, for example.
Would be interested in hearing what people think of it. I wanted to offer a tool that people could use over and over again to get new information about the election, rather than a story that offered up a specific narrative about it.
Today residents of Illinois' 5th congressional district are voting on a replacement for Rahm Emmanuel. About a week ago, we built and launched a twitter buzz tracker to let folks see how the front runners stacked up on the popular micoblogging service.
Anytime a front runner is mentioned by name by a non-campaign twitter account, the tracker picks it up and adds it to the running line graph at the top of the page.
Hovering over the graph creates a breakdown of how each day went in the race across Twitter: who was mentioned the most, keywords from election-related tweets and articles linked to from election-related tweets.
Then down below, a tabbed reader lets you get the latest tweets about each candidate with a 5-minute delay.
Reception for the tracker has been really positive. One of Slate's bloggers just linked over to it today and last week all the local sites did.
The great thing about this is how re-useable the code is for other big stories. You could see which Lollapalooza bands are getting the most buzz during the festival, for example.
Would be interested in hearing what people think of it. I wanted to offer a tool that people could use over and over again to get new information about the election, rather than a story that offered up a specific narrative about it.