Over the last two days I looked at the Heatmaps of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as well as news sources and other information about what TextMap is and how I feel about the the service; today I'll look at TextMap Popularity and what it  might mean to both candidates in the next Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.

Barack Obama News Source Analysis (above) and Hillary Clinton News Source Analysis (below)

From the looks of it there's a lot more news coverage of Barack than Hillary -What  would be helpful, from my point of view, is to click on the chats above and get the news stories in the media being covered so you can drilldown and compare - esp when the time period overlaps;TextMap does not yet allow you to do that now and is somewhat useless for real analysis.

There's also a sentiment analysis set of charts but I find them difficult to understand.  Maybe all of this information form TextMap is useful to a statistician, but from the point of view for someone that does not use that language - I find it harder to get  much useful out of TextMap yet..even though the TextMap service has a lot of interesting features and is way more interesting, to me, than, say www.Knover.com, which tried to do much the same thing but does not succeed even as well, in my opinion.

Textmap is an intersting service that you can play with - but I would not place much stock in it, for now, just keep an eye on it and hope it gets better. 

The other problem with this service right now is the news sources for each state are way too restrictive and in the case of New York, lacks the New York Times - and I can't imagine this being accurate for New York without it.

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.