January 9th, 2008
Politweets, a political buzz tracker based on Twitter
I’ve written before about how Twitter could become the ultimate “buzz tracker”, after the micro-blogging service introduced the ability to track a particular keyword across all of Twitter’s public conversations. I also suggested ways in which Twitter might make better use of this new functionality:
Twitter could make some of this “buzz” more public and better organized on the site’s front-page. A tag cloud of recent and popular keywords would give a very raw but interesting snapshot of what’s “hot”, and if an algorithm was developed to categorize certain buzz words…, Twitter could offer a buzz tracker for different broader topics e.g. Tech or Entertainment etc.
Politweets.com has done just that by pulling in and displaying Twitter posts that mention any of the candidates in the forthcoming U.S. presidential election, creating a real-time political buzz tracker.
The results are then displayed side-by-side: Democrats on the left, Republicans on the right.
As Josh Catone writes, over at Read/WriteWeb, “for political junkies, Politweet will be a must monitor web-site on every primary date this season…” I’m hooked.
Steve O'Hear is a London-based consultant, educator, and journalist, focussing on the Internet and all aspects of digital technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
