Bloggasm

Yesterday PBS published an article of mine about Web 2.0 tools that people are using to aggregate data on the election.

One that I didn’t get a chance to mention is one I’m working on for my day job at New Media Strategies: Freshly Squeezed Election Tweets

Here’s a rundown of some of its features:

What is it?

It’s an abstract visualization of the aggregate conversation on the popular social media platform, Twitter, showing frequency and context of election-related words.

How does it work?

We take a sample from Twitter every 30 seconds and analyze them in 50-result batches for associations and term matches. They accumulate for 5 minutes and then we flush sample aggregates to the database. As new terms trend, they begin to populate on the X-axis.

Wait, say that again?

The site will pull a continuous stream of tweets mentioning Obama and McCain, representing the most-used terms as a series of bubbles. The bigger the “bubble” the more frequently the term is being used.

So what am I looking for?

Each bubble is colored red and blue: the more red, the more the term correlates with McCain, the more blue, the more Obama. Keyword bubbles are themselves connected by half-circles (solid colors only), showing relationships between them. The stronger the connection, the thicker the line. And a bit later today, we’ll add a feature so you can sort by time periods.