Since I have access to use it to figure out the influential voices online shaping the debate about John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as Republican VP Candidate last Friday  - here’s the list of “influentials” though you’ll need Radian6 to pull up the actual blog posts that are being listed) - the file is called sp-2.

And here’s what it looks like in Radian6

However Radian6 lacks something I think they need to add - as it becomes apperant when you try to drill down to find out sentiment for the Palin choice - for me there’s no easy way to create a set of comparision phases that accurately define the current opinions online - nor are Search Engines any help, since they just pick sort and rank phrases, not the sentiment around them.

Also, people often don’t say what they mean - when you’ve got millions of people repeating slang and common terms, it’s often difficult to settle on any set of terms that accurately defines opinion.

Another thing I wish Radian6 had, was a “nearness” or “close to” operator, similar to what Search Engines have had for a while, particularly Google - but most do have it - it looks for how close a word or phase is to another and makes a determination of relevence of the two phrases by their “proximity” to each other - there’s nothing in Radian6 today, that does that.  They should add it - but I imagine, it will add to processing time and make calculations of engagement and relevance more complicated.

Still, Radian6 and other tools like it need “Proximity” operations - saying “inexerienced” directly next to Sarah Palin’s name is different than saying “inexperienced” a few paragraphs away from her name.  In this way, Radian6 needs to incorporate some of Google’s intelligence - but that’s just my opinion - otherwise, it’s too much work to wade through every post to figure out what the sentiment and point of it is.

Another example - look at this - Scary - is Sarah Palin going to end up being US President? Somewhere else Hillary Is Smiling

But when you look at the actual posts in the “experience” category I created, you see its’ all over the spectrum - in other words, I could not get down to a filter that was sufficently precise to just those posts that expressed Sarah Palin had enough experience against those that said she didn’t have enough experience.

What would be great is if Radian6 did that for me.  Right …. Take those posts from Blogs, Mainstream Media and break them into phrase combinations - and then - offer to run those through a comparative topic monitor (shown above) for you - that way, at least some of the work of wading through conflicting opinions will be done for us.

And, another source of possible ideas for how to pick the phases you’d run into the comparative topic monitor (let alone Sentiment Analysis - which really isn’t done fully, or enough, today) is tapping into the BlogPulse Key Phrase Analysis for the day - here’s part of the analysis for August 30th, 2008 pertaining to the Sarah Palin VP Choice, the latest one at the time of me writing this post:

If we could get even to the level of content analysis of isolating phases like those above (”disaffected hillary clinton supporters” AND “sarah palin” with “good choice” or “bad choice” or something that works) we’d magnify what tools like Radian6, already very powerful, can do.

Right now, I could probably take those phrases and stick them into the Comparative Topic Monitor - no big deal - so I did that - at least for the top 6 phases - there were quite a few more but this is enough to prove a point.

Of the terms I picked “Palin pick” occured the most often in the last two days - and finally, I get to something I can use today -and can chart over time:

Look at this:

Now we have something - still very crude - but useful - perhaps, even a KPI metric we can monitor over time (were I in the political monitoring business - which I was some time - it feels like “horse racing” - sorta - handicapping the winners - too bad there’s no prize - like a million dollar ticket on a bet - oh well - just wishful thinking.

But here, at least, in the chart above, after a 4 or 5 hours of work - I managed to figure out some way to at least “filter” what Radian6 supplies, out of the box, into a “Yes” / “No” metric.

Of the content that had “Palin pick” in the last two days, about 1/3 also had the phase (experienced or inexperienced) - I filtered those out and today - it looks like twice as many voices (conversations) think Sarah Palin is too inexperienced to be Vice President than those who think she should - again, a  useful KPI (were I John McCain or Barack Obama, or running those campaigns).   If that number gets a lot smaller - if say 20% think Sarah Palin is not experienced enough in 2 months time, vs what it is today - I’d day, that’s very bad news for the Democrats.

But even here - if we ffurther refine this view of who thinks Sarah Palin is too inexperienced to be Vice President - to the top 10 influencers - also offered by Radian 6

.. there’s only one place where the debate is really being shaped, and that’s the Penny Arcade (ha!)

Whereas, for the view that Sarah Palin is experienced enough - we get three top sources where that debate is being shaped:

A lot of it (opinion shaping on weather Sarah Palin has the experience) is on the AOL Message Boards, Go My Town, and Campaign Diaries - I took an except from Campaign Diaries post, below

“…If my first post’s general sense was that McCain had made a strong move, this one is going in the opposite direction. My indecision isn’t surprising: This is a huge gamble and we will have to see how Palin performs in the months ahead, what coverage she receives and whether she can move the female vote before having a better idea of how her presence on the Republican ticket will play out.”

So the metrics, if one wants to pull out of this last statement - for how this all will play out - in some measure, might now be how well “Palin performs” and if the “female vote” of “dissaffected Hillary Supporters” actually moves over to Palin, or not - or how much it does move over to Palin.

This - the movement of the “dissaffected Hillary Supports” would be the main metric I’d suggest monitoring - via polling and Radian6 - provided you can get a decent filtering mechinism into Radian6 that pulls out the noise in the content being crawled - again, not an easy thing to do.

Right now - I’m not too happy with the map I’m seeing below - the electoral collage as it appears today - I think it’s way too close to call - and that scares me -

Let’s hope Barack Obama will use Hillary Clinton to highlight how different they both really are - it’s not just about woman in the White House - its what kind person is there - what their values are - let’s hope - because this map, is scary - I don’t care what anyone else is saying - thre’s not much Blue in the map - way too much Red.

Not good for Barack Obama - he needs to get a lot more Blue in that map -that’s my take on August 31st, 2008.

Too tired to really post much more tonight - yet this article in the New York Times on The Facebooker Who Friended Obama is worth a read- I also posted on it briefly at  The Analytics Guru - Secret to Obama’s success - Facebook? .

Mr. Hughes, 24, was one of four founders of Facebook. In early 2007, he left the company to work in Chicago on Senator Obama’s new-media campaign. Leaving behind his company at such a critical time would appear to require some cognitive dissonance: political campaigns, after all, are built on handshakes and persuasion, not computer servers, and Mr. Hughes has watched, sometimes ruefully, as Facebook has marketed new products that he helped develop.

“It was overwhelming for the first two months,” he recalled. “It took a while to get my bearings.”

But in fact, working on the Obama campaign may have moved Mr. Hughes closer to the center of the social networking phenomenon, not farther away.

Makes me wonder … what if Mr. Hughes did not end up working for Obama, or worked for Hillary Clinton, instead… where would we be today?

Sometimes, I get the feeling that greatness is really not just about the man (or woman) it's about the people you attract - it's about the team - the ability to assemble and run such a team is what makes someone great.

The centerpiece of it all is My.BarackObama.com, where supporters can join local groups, create events, sign up for updates and set up personal fund-raising pages. “If we did not have online organizing tools, it would be much harder to be where we are now,” Mr. Hughes said.

Mr. Obama, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, credits the Internet’s social networking tools with a “big part” of his primary season success.

And that got me to my original thought - and the reason why Barack Obama should pick Hillary Clinton as his running mate - it's all in this statement from the New York Times article:

Now Mr. Hughes and other campaign aides are applying the same social networking tools to try to win the general election. This time, however, they must reach beyond their base of young, Internet-savvy supporters.

Correct.   Look at the election that happened in France last year - and look at Howard Dean's campaign 4 years ago - what do they have in common? What about one of the Republicans who ran in the primary with very strong internet support that did not translate into voter support?

Here's what I think ….. Obama mobilized a lot of people to vote, largely using the internet, who were apathetic about politics usual - many of them use and feel comfortable with the Internet and they tend to be younger and more progressive.

But what about people who are older, less progressive, and not particularly Internet Savvy?  I know a lot of people like that - still, people who don't even have the Internet at home, or hardly use the internet, and have the lowest tech mobile phone you can get.

Those people won't be reached by Facebook, MySpace, whatever - Twitter - YouTube - they're not interested - or maybe they're afraid of it - maybe it's too much for them.

Barack Obama needs to reach ot to people who don't use the computer much, or at all, and Hillary Clinton is a much stronger candidate, I feel, in this area.  That's why, I believe, the best outcome for Barack, dispate the personality differences, would to have a combined ticket - and as Vice President, let Hillary fix HealthCare - succeed this time where she failed, 15 years ago.

That's what I think.  I bet I could provide metrics that would support what I'm writing here today, and maybe I will, but not tonight.

I feel like the guy from Gladiator, the movie, that mused about time to die … "but not yet, not yet".   Anyway, enough posting for one day.

Been so busy with Internet Week activities in New York it's been hard to post - and - there's a lot to post about - if I could just remember it now - there were many thoughts I had over the three days that could be the subject of a post, save the time to post about it, which I didn't have.

Ok, today Hillary Clinton is "giving up" in her race for the US Presidency - Ending Her Bid, Clinton Backs Obama -I supported Hillary and it feels to me as Obama has an easy way into the White House come November, or does he?

I'm not sure he does.  Signs I'm seeing point to two conflicting realities - which one you buy into is up to you - I know that I feel both realities …. but I'm not sure which one will end up winning out.

There's the first reality - that Americans are so tired of George W. Bush and the Republicans, even a "monkey", if it was the democratic candidate, could win.  I know that's an over simplification - but in this reality, the one that I sense is hovering above us - the Republicans have been "dis-armed" and they are now, despite appearances, weaker than any point in the last 46 years - and the next election will prove that.   

There's also many new people that have been drawn into this election who want Barack Obama to win - and didn't feel too committed to Hillary Clinton - they just got involved wanted change - a total change.   Positions weren't looked at so much as image and personality (sounds familiar).

The other reality is highlighted by a post from John Evans, Obama and McCain - the real battle begins that essentially, claims that many people who are on the sidelines now will promote McCain because they're afraid of Obama and what he stands for (funny, I got photographed with "Obama Girl" last night at a Mashable Party last night in Mid Manhattan ).

I have to say, Obama Girl does look good, but does that mean, for all that people want Obama to win, that he will?

The other reality says that many people are going to vote for McCain because they understand who he is, and they don't understand Obama, and where he's going to take the country.

I spoke to one of my friends today who said he was going to vote for McCain, that Obama scares him.  

I, personally, don't have a problem with Barack Obama, but now that he's pretty much the candidate  I think we're going to be seeing a real roller-coaster effect for the next 4 or 5 months.

In this other reality - the one I speak, it's a much closer election - much closer - and the outcome isn't clear.  At least, a few, in the International Community, think it's going to be McCain.

And that seems really strange, from here.  How an a President and a Party, so unpopular, who have made so many mistakes, get re-elected?  And yet, it happens.  Who knows, maybe Obama is the perfect candidate to create that scenario - I don't know.

But I do know this - taking Hillary Clinton as a running mate has it's pros and cons and while I'd like to see her on the ticket - it's a dual edged sword - but if it were up to me …. a lot of people who are not going to vote for Obama, like my friend, and doing so anyway … while having Hillary Clinton on the ticket doesn't really alienate anyone who would have voted for him, gets him many people who aren't too sure about him - but also polarized people who are sitting on the fence and will stay Republican. Still, if would wish her to be on the the Vice Presidential candidate.

And, in a way, the race has now polarized with McCain being strengthened but recent developments (see the BlogPulse chart, above) and with over 2% of the Blogoshere traffic weighing in (too bad there's no sentiment analysis with BlogPulse)…. (I can't wait to use Radian6 and Buzzlogic - to test out more theories).

For one thing, I want to explore how these "two realities" are evolving over the next 4 or 5 months - I think they'd be a fascinating study. 

The momentum of the Presidential Campaign is picking up and, I think, within the next two weeks we'll pretty much have a decision of the Democratic side - which I wrote about in Does anyone really know what is going to happen in November?

Today someone came by and offered their opinions - and everyone's got one, or several, but I sense no one really knows exactly how it's all going to play out.

I think, until a couple of weeks ago Hillary Clinton thought she had the nomination all locked up, but look what happened (see below)

This guy represents what no one really saw ahead:

And here's his response to the first video 

Universal Health Care is going to be in the news again when Hillary Clinton proposes Universal Health Care on Monday, September 17th, according to the New York Times in Clinton to Propose Universal Health Care . 

According to WikiPedia Universal Health Care is:

"…..Universal health care is a state in which all residents of a geographic or political region have access to most types of health care."

Universal health care is provided in most developed countries, and many developing countries across the globe. In the 1880s, most Germans became covered under the mandatory health care system championed by Bismarck. National Health Service in the United Kingdom was the world's first universal health care system provided by government. It was established in 1948. The most comprehensive today is in France, and the second most is in Italy^{[citation needed]}. Other examples are Medicare in Australia, established in the 1970s, and by the same name Medicare in Canada, established between 1966 and 1984. Universal health care contrasts to the systems like health care in the United States or South Africa, though South Africa is one of the many countries attempting health care reform.^[1]"

Is the WikiPedia entry saying the German's are more than 100 years ahead of the archaic American Medical Insurance System?  Sure looks that way.  Also the Connecticut Coalition for Universal Health Care has a fact sheet showing the longer the United States stays on a Private Insurance or no insurance plan, the lower life expectancy and higher Infant Mortality rates go.

Myth One: The United States has the best health care system in the world.

1. Fact One: The United States ranks 23rd in infant mortality, down from 12th in 1960 and 21st in 1990

• Fact Two: The United States ranks 20th in life expectancy for women down from 1st in 1945 and 13th in 1960
• Fact Three: The United States ranks 21st in life expectancy for men down from 1st in 1945 and 17th in 1960.

Interestingly, the Associated Press just put out an article that outlines each Presidential Candidate position on Universal Health Care in Presidential Candidates on Health Care. 

However, I think it's much more interesting to look at the Blogosphere to see which candidates are dominating an issue, and Hillary Clinton is dominating Universal Health Care as shown by BlogPulse:

Comparing the buzz on Universal Health Care (The Mayo Clinic jumped into the national debate on improving health care yesterday, calling for every individual to have basic universal insurance as a step toward gradually replacing the current employer-based system) with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama shows, in it's spikes and dips, that Hillary Clinton is shaping, or in line with the debate more than Barack Obama.

On the other hand, political candidates trailing Hillary Clinton are often dominating their messaging on the issues rather than dominating the issues; at least, that's the way it looks to me.

Oh well, it's a quiet Sunday, after all, though the debate about Universal Health Care is going to heat up again, on Monday when  Clinton Proposes Universal Health Care.

You can already see how YouTube is changing the dynamics of the next Presidential Election as pointed out by B.L. Ochman:

"…No matter what your politics, you have to admit that this video is clever. It's the way Hillary announces the winner of her campaign song contest. This one will go viral in a heartbeat. This raises the bar in the YouTube election, in which Hillary's use of social media certainly has taken an early lead.

I guess this is as relaxed as she gets, so let's give her an A for effort. Bill's a natural."

I don't know what the song is going to be … but look at all the subtle messaging - and sophistication that's going into this messaging.

Measuring the effect of this video would be interesting … what's the metric? .. how many times the request for the winning song is asked for vs. the downloads of the streaming video (which she knows since she's streaming it off her own site).

Well..they got Celine Dion to put a song on her site …and it was a clever way to get leads (votes?):

Following up on my post yesterday on TextMap - here's a comparison of the heat maps of both Democratic candidates for the next Presidential Election in 2008.  According to Textmap, the definition of a heatmap is:

Heatmap: shows the relative interest in an entity at every locale in the United States. We have developed a geographic model of news influence which enables us to gauge the relative amount of exposure a given entity has received as a function of location.

The heatmaps are actually more relevant because they tell me where Obama is stronger than Hillary and vice versa.  California, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin are moving more towards Obama than Hillary Clinton and that's information that a politician can use even now - but it will get a lot more relevant as the elections loom closer.

I'll cover a little more of what you can do with TextMap on Friday.

I'm surprised I did not hear about TextMap, the entity Search Engine, earlier. According to the marketing text, TextMap is a search engine for entities - namely important (and not so important) people, places, and things in the news. TextMap news analysis system automatically identifies and monitors these entities, and identifies meaningful relationships between them.

There's a good post about TextMap's capabilities at ResourceShelf.

But how good is it? I tried using TextMap but can't say I felt there was anything that I could use as direct information.   I tried a political figure - Hillary Rodham Clinton, just to get a full readout (since many of the other candidates don't have all the information processed that TextMap can provide).

First I get a bunch of articles and a map:

I don't actually understand this map as well as I'd like to - nor do I understand what to do with the information - maybe that's the problem for me.

And yet, if we compare the TextMap of Clinton with Barack Obama we get something  much stronger, more direct in h is map than hers - and that's all based on semantic analysis of text in the news media that may, in itself, not be that accurate - but that's what we have to work with and that's what TextMap is using - along with the other online sources that were cited:

It's all very interesting - and I'll get into that more in my next post, tomorrow.

ComScore just released a report today that, to me, says Barack Obama's support is much broader than Hillary Clinton's - at least, that's how I read the numbers although that's not how ComScore reported it.

"…Younger Visitors Favor BarackObama.com

With 33 percent of visitors to BarackObama.com under the age of 35, as compared 19 percent of visitors to HillaryClinton.com, Senator Obama’s site is clearly attracting a younger online audience.  Most notably, visitors between the ages of 18-24 were 48 percent more likely than average to visit Obama’s site, indicating a strong affinity for Senator Obama among the college-aged crowd.  "

"…HillaryClinton.com Draws Heavier Interest among Wealthiest Households

Both sites attract visitors from higher-income households, but the wealthiest households – those with at least $100,000 in annual income – were 57 percent more likely than average to visit HillaryClinton.com and just 18 percent more likely to visit BarackObama.com. 

Both Clinton and Obama were also more likely than average to draw African-American visitors.  Specifically, African-Americans were 20 percent more likely than the average Internet user to visit HillaryClinton.com and 127 percent more likely to visit BarackObama.com."

Here's a modified chart of what ComScore presented showing how voters in different income levels responded to each of the two websites.

Demographic Profile: Visitors to BarackObama.com vs. HillaryClinton.com
Feb-07
Source: comScore Media Metrix
	HillaryClinton.com		BarackObama.com
	Percent Composition	Composition Index*	Percent Composition	Composition Index*
Household Income	100	100	100	100
Under $25,000	r="#333333" face="Arial">5.8	63	12.2	131
$25,000 - $39,999	4.5	48	6.7	72
$40,000 - $59,999	22.5	79	27.7	98
$60,000 - $74,999	10.8	89	13.5	111
$75,000 - $99,999	20.6	114	12.9	71
$100,000+	35.8	157	27	118
Race	100	100	100	100
Caucasian/White	92.2	101	87.4	96
African-American/Black	6.5	120	12.3	227
Asian	0.3	15	N/A	N/A
Other	1	69	0.3	19

The way I see it - the more groups you have voting for you - the more likely you are to win.

But we'll see what happens in the future - 2008 is still a while away, but it is coming up quickly and will be here before we know it.

I noticed HitWise's commentary on Clinton Campaign Website Receives 2X More Traffic than Obama Website on Campaign Announcement Day    and wondered if I could get the same quality of information with free tools and my own ingenuity.  Granted, we're measuring different things (HitWise Search Share vs. Blog Citations) in the first case.

Note: the focus of Leeann Prescott's post - using HitWise data to understand who is contributing to the political campaigns of the democratic candidates being examined here.  My post is about comparing the quality of HitWise, BlogPulse and Quantcast.  Decided not to go beyond that focus for this post.

Here's the HitWise chart showing Hillary getting twice the traffic of Obama on the day of their announcements of exploring running for the US Presidency in 2008.

There's two URLs for Hilary and Obama and one for Edwards.  I put the three main URLs into BlogPulse and showed the trend for the last month (see below).

There's a  relationship between US Search Share and Blog Citations; I get almost as much useful information from from BlogPulse ans I could from HitWise.

Look what happens when I superimpose the HitWise chart over the BlogPulse chart.

For hillaryclinton.com and barackobama.com the spikes on Jan 17th and Jan 20th are almost identical!

The main limitation of BlogPulse, as far as I'm concerned, is the limit of 3 terms that can be compared at any one time; I think BlogPulse should be made to allow up to 6 terms to be compared in one chart.

What about the Demographics part?  First I'll compare Gender of visitors to Hillary and Obama's official campaign sites. Can I get good enough data out of a free tool that match a paid one?  Yes.

The Quantcast data is arranged slightly differently than HitWise's chart comparing the gender of visitors to Hillary and Obama's site - but I can argue the differences are almost meaningless at this point. 

I got a result that was good enough.  In Hillary's case, there are more females visiting than males - and personally, I find that more believable than HitWise's greater skew toward male visitors of Hillary's site over females.

How about comparing the ages of visitors to Hillary and Obama's site?  The Free Quantcast.com tool provided results as good as, if not better than HitWise.

The data is arranged differently yet I come to same conclusions - Hillary Clinton has the strongest segment from young people 18-24 years old and Obama draws from 25-34 year old segment of visitors.   Is this a cause of concern for Hillary? Yes, because voters who are older are more likely to vote in the next election.  However, at this time, the comparisons are almost meaningless to what's going happen on Election day, 2008.   I'd argue that I got good enough data from Quantcast to do basic comparisons.  If I wanted more precision - yes, I might have to buy HitWise - but the case to buy HitWise licenses, now,  is much weaker now than it was 2 or 3 years ago.

Finally, there's income - can I get good enough income profiling from a free tool vs. a paid one?  Yes.

There's not that much difference between the quality and resolution of free tools and the more expensive paid one versions.

One thing is for sure - the bar is always being raised - while Hitwise has been a premium tool - it's too expensive for most people to use  - and now, that power is becoming almost irrelevant as QuantCast and Compete move into areas that were once the exclusive domain of Nielsen Netratings, Com score and later on, HitWise.

2007 should be pretty interesting in terms of more powerful metrics packages being available at free or low prices.

read more »