Well folks, this is it. After two years of the longest presidential campaign ever — and one hopes it can’t get any longer — the polls are open and people are standing in line all across America. Or, given the early hour, all across the Eastern time zone. And this time around people are doing something they couldn’t the last: posting their thoughts to Twitter via mobile device.
Why do I bring all this up? Because New Media Strategies (where I work and whence I type) has teamed up with Tropicana (the orange juice makers, not the casino resort) to create a Twitter-focused data visualization tool that we’re calling Fresh Squeezed Election Tweets, and just went live a few moments ago at www.anorangeamerica.com:
The site is continuously collecting tweets using the words “Obama” and “McCain”, counting up which other words appear with them — Vote, Election, Country — and other words that appear frequently — Bush, War, Lie (no one said Twitter was fair and balanced) — and representing this frequency by the size of the associated blue-red bubble. The bluer it is, the closer-aligned the keyword is with Obama; the more red, the more it’s McCain. And see the black lines connecting? Those show you which words are used together most: if you mouseover the keywords, you’ll get actual percentages. Did I mention it’s embeddable? I don’t think I did. Here, let me: It’s embeddable.
Is that cool, or what? Feel free to use it in your own posts and check back throughout the day, as the data set changes and perhaps reveals some insight into the day’s events. We might already have a pretty good idea who will be president-elect by day’s end, but Freshly Squeezed Election Tweets may help give a better idea why.
