A comment from a subscriber / reader of Webmetricsguru brought up that John Edwards is often referred to as JRE; if all the alternate names of candidates are used you could get a fairer image of the popularity of each (comment below).

"Love that blog search tool. One suggestion, Edwards is often called JRE so adding that search name would return additional hits. He’s still well below Al Gore as this search indicates. I usually search John Edwards, JRE, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Mark Warner at HuffPo for the news diary on his website. Just something to consider."

IF we did that here’s what we’d see:

But to be fair, we’d probably want to do that with all the other names of the list, since some of them also are referred to by additional names (ie: Hillary Clinton = Hillary Rodham Clinton = Hilary = Senator Clinton).  It would be fairer  and more accurate to have an expansion of this People Tracker tool that allows for all the additional names a person or thing is called be added up as one label (and also let you see the blog posts, as the blogpulse.com Trend tool allows you to do).

I’m not saying HuffPo should do this now - but if you want to measure the popularity and Buzz around someone - you need to add all the names they go by in the press (including Slang Names).

Using John Edwards + JRE would give you 600 blog citations - 1 over the 599 for John Kerry (meaning that John Edwards has at least as much Buzz going for him over the last week as John Kerry).   

ON the other hand, we need to see the quality and duration of the Buzz, something the HuffPo tool does not do.    Like I said, using metrics to track political campaigns and public figures are just beginning - the science of it still hasen’t evolved yet and no one has even written a book about it.  There is no "how to" book on this - people are making it up as they go along.