I missed the TechCrunch Hackathon in Manhattan last weekend (I’m not a programmer and it did not make sense to go) though TechCrunch covered the TechCrunch Hackathon in detail in a post titled The Best Of The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon.

Found some very interesting stuff being developed at  TechCrunch Hackathon – the tools and platforms have matured to the level where an application can be spawned by a talented developer in a matter of hours (though such an application may still have limited capabilities and not always be able to handle massive amounts of traffic or complicated queries / questions in a uniform manner yet).

Last weekend I mentioned TechCrunch Disrupt also reminded me of AlwaysON! Conferences  (both are three days and have many of the same speakers)- but certainly – this “HackaThon” is one way TechCrunch and AlwaysON! are very different -don’t think AlwaysON! conferences have software development happening at the conference.

One of the winners of TechCrunch Disrupt is a Hack created last weekend called “Twitter Demographics” – and while it doesn’t 100% work and seems limited on what it will report on – is truly amazing in what does do – take the query “oilspill” (the platform does not appear to work well yet with multi word queries – well, what can you expect with a hack created on the fly in a dozen hours or so?).  Twitter Demographics was one of the winners of the TechCrunch Hackathon – here’s what TechCrunch says about Twitter Demographics.

Twitter Demographics
Twitter Demographics mashes up Tweets with geolocation and demographic data. So if you search for a specific keyword on the application, you can see the percentage of Twitterers who Tweeted about the keyword within certain income ranges and even by political party, giving more info not just about where they are but who they are.

Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/29/best-disrupt-hackathon/#ixzz0pLQpNng5

I tried to get something to display in Twitter Demographics related to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill and managed to get a readout on “oilspill” though “oil spill” and “gulf coast” did not work.

Twitter Demographics on the Gulf Coast Oil Spill

A couple of things to consider here:

1. We don’t know the size of the data set being used – I think  a fraction of the Twitter Firehose is actually being used as the report only processes 12000 or so records – it maybe that all the mentions being using are associated with income, political affiliation and location ahead of time – not sure.
2. We don’t know how many of the records processed actually pertain to “oilspill” and the percentages of the pie chart in the diagram above are based on that number of records – what if only a few hundred records pertained but the rest were ignored?
3. So many queries you might want to know about do not work, that your fairly limited in what you can ask Twitter Demographics about today.   Certainly this would be great research for Brands – but it’s hard to get it to work well, yet.
4. Twitter Demographics is a Hack – it probably can’t handle a lot of people asking for information at one time.
5. The demographics and political data are somewhat open to question as to reliability and we need to know more about how that data is collected and used – having said that – what is assemb

Assuming the data Twitter Demographics assembled on what is essentially a hashtag about the Gulf Coast Oil Spill has any validity, here’s some insights that it suggests.

First, more than two thirds (68%) of the Twitter conversation about the Gulf Coast Oil Spill is from Republicans (and given the sharply polarized nature of our politics is almost certain to be negative to President Obama’s handling on the crisis and his leadership or lack of in this situation.  Without this “hack” it would have almost be impossible to make that particular insight.

Just the other day I noticed in my RSS feeds just how negative the conversations online have turned on Obama’s handling of the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Crisis – even though, in all honestly, there’s probably not much more he could do in terms of remedies to the situation than he has already done.  Could the Obama Administration have prevented the Oil Spill – technically – yes, without issuing permits to allow drilling – the disaster in the Gulf Coast would not have happened, and the latest set of permits come after Obama was voted in.

Let’s put it this way – there’s plenty of blame to  go around.  On the other hand, to foresee and fix every possible abuse and mistake in a agencies that have a long history of being over permissive – is a lot to expect, especially in a year.   I’m not saying the Obama Administration isn’t responsible – but it’s not the only place to look.

And, it’s  not as if the Federal Government / Coast Guard, etc (as Paul Krugman pointed out a few weeks ago it was the Republicans in the Bush Administration who crippled the ability of government agencies to respond to situations like this Oil Spill and 15 months in power is probably not enough time to correct for 8 years of more lax rules and abuse) can actually stop the oil spill all by itself – and while it could respond perhaps a little more forcibly – it probably needs the same entities that caused the problem in the first, to stop the Oil Spill – which is going on.

Also, Krugman points our to just how much Katrina Revisionism is going on now.

So, for Twitter Demographics to gauge close to 70% of the brouhaha about #OilSpill is from Republicans almost exposes the nature of the attack as a coordinated effort to make the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Obama’s and the Democrats Katrina – even if we suspected as much – we could never prove it before – but now, possible, a simple hack like this, exposes it.  Wow!  And Midterm Elections are coming up, so there’s even more incentive to find more fault with how this situation is being handled.  Nuff said.

And, if I’m reading the pie chart demographics correctly (with that rainbow effect, it’s not easy to separate one category from another when there are so many and the colors of adjacent categories are pretty close) a significant chunk of the audience for this #oilspill conversation is coming from the “Mining Industry” … we’ll, isn’t that interesting?

Assuming I’m correct, it would imply the entities that created this mess are among the most vocal voices here, along with Real Estate, Rental Leasing (oil rigs?) and Insurance.

Just to sum this post up – I’m in no way saying the Gulf Coast Oil Spill is handled correctly or not - and I’m not saying that Twitter Demographics is accurate, or not - and I have thrown out a lot of questions about the data and reliability of this information – but ……. what is in front of me is very interesting picture – and all done through a TechCrunch Disrupt Hack last weekend …. and if that isn’t “Disruptive”, I don’t know what would be.

You?