It’s not enough that you watch the political party conventions on TV, read the political coverage in newspapers, and the reactions in blogs. Some people are not reacting on blogs, they are reacting on Twitter. But how do you follow all of that raw political discourse, and do you even want to?
Stephen Taylor, a Canadian blogger and political analyst, has hacked together govtweets, a site that constantly updates with the latest Tweets that mention any of the political candidates (McCain, Obama, Palin, and Biden). He also created a Facebook app. The Tweets automatically update and scroll down the page. There is no way to search for past Tweets, and once a Tweet scrolls off the page there is no way to find it again. So Govtweets is nothing more than a snapshot of the national conversation, but it is still fascinating to watch it unfold.
Here are some recent Govtweets (newly announced Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin seems to be dominating the conversation):
An Alaskan’s Perspective on Sarah Palin: A down-to-earth description of Sarah Palin’s time as Alaska’s Gover.. http://tinyurl.com/6h7h69
August 31st – 4:52:47 am PST
GOP Alaska State Senator: Palin Not Ready to Be Gov/VP: “She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be p.. http://tinyurl.com/5gp6mk
August 31st – 4:52:43 am PST
Who scrubbed Wikipedia’s entry for Sarah Palin just before nom announcement? http://tinyurl.com/6n9dnk
August 31st – 4:51:41 am PST
Interesting watching the Obama meme evolve: http://tinyurl.com/6nyehp Worth seeing all three pages.
August 31st – 4:51:21 am PST
An Alaskan’s Perspective on Sarah Palin: A down-to-earth description of Sarah Palin’s time as Alaska’s G.. http://tinyurl.com/6h7h69
August 31st – 4:51:02 am PST
that’s hepful
i mean that’s helpful… govtweets: a quick tweet way to stay tuned to the political race.
This is going to be one heck of a fight for the presidency.
http://www.mysp...atedndetermined
Thanks! This is helpful.
http://www.KidT...ru.blogspot.com
Amazing what can be done in micro-mode; perfect find for us at Shaping Youth.org, (media and marketing’s impact on kids) tx!
p.s. In Nickelodeon’s ‘Kids Pick the President’ primary they picked the front runners way back in Jan: http://www.shap...rg/blog/?p=1078 Imagine having your future at stake and no say in the outcome. eep! Parents, ‘teach your children well’…media literacy goes a long way and GovTweets is a great one to use for deconstruction of same! Excellent stuff!
–Amy Jussel, Founder, Exec. Dir. Shaping Youth.org
come on Obama! I hope you win!
Too much of a bad thing?
Does anyone else think the screen shot above makes it seem like an unfiltered and un-audience approved Digg?
Joke on the subject:
An official from a totalitarian country was asked:
Q: Do you have elections?
A: Yes, evely molning.
Oh, I missed the new Techcrunch design. Looks good, but ads are pretty big. Gotta pay the bills I guess.
The best site for this is http://www.pers...ctv.com/#charts by far. Awesome!
The link to the Facebook app takes me to the fan page. I’m not seeing an actual app anywhere (but if one existed, I’d probably add it!). Help?
yeah, thank u!
So this little website named politweets (http://politweets.com/) that got a mention on the Twitter blog 6 months ago has been doing the exact same thing since the start of the year…. With a much nicer design.
When did TechCrunch become a site with a political agenda? We have enough of those already. Can we keep TC focused on what really changes the world; technology and forget about what we can’t change; politics?
It’s amazing to see even politics being effected by the constantly growing world of web 2.0.
TWEEETS! TWEEEEEETS TWEETS TWEETS TWEEEEETS! TWEEEETS! TWEETS TWEEEETS TWEEETS TWEEEETS!
Obama’s online campaign really was one of the best put together online campaigns ever. Anyone in online marketing can learn something from this.
Online is playing a huge part in day to day politics and this will only get bigger, facebook, twitter etc