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The Presidential Debate, Twitter, and Plodt

October 7th, 2008 by bensons · Comments

During this evening’s Presidential debate in Nashville, I sat in front of my television twittering away. For me these debates are like sporting events. I get excited and cheer their answers, or make fun of them. It’s a good time. But tonight was even better because of the suggestion by Andy Carvin of NPR that we “dialtest” the debate using Twitter, and the support of a new website called Plodt which draws graphs based on Twitter messages. The result of this experiment was this graph:

This was a lot of fun, and I will definitely participate in the next stage of this experiment.

Tags: Internet · Politics · Technology


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    BTW, it's clear that this isn't a balanced or normalized survey; Twitter users apparently lean towards Obama. Or, at least, Twitter users that learned about this experiment (i.e. because we follow NPR News) lean towards Obama. Maybe next election there will be a website that can manage this polling more scientifically, while maintaining the sort of open participation that Twitter has enabled. That will be fun.
 

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