Posts in the category: politics

Using Twitter to Track the Grassroots Reaction to Barack Obama’s Stance on FISA

AJ Herrmann — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:00:01 +0000

Sometimes monitoring blogs and mainstream news sources just isn’t enough. This can become very apparent when you’re trying to manage your company’s brand or image while an issue is exploding in your lap.

One example of this is the uproar that happened when Senator Obama decided to support the compromise bill on FISA immunity recently passed by the House. These tweets were posted on Twitter just as the group Senator Obama Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity — Get FISA Right, was forming on my.barackobama.com to protest Obama’s stance on FISA.

The anger that caused people to post these tweets has helped the anti-FISA group become the singe largest in Obama’s own online community: a fact that has received significant media coverage from mainstream sources.

Using Managing News to Trace a Story Back to Its Source

AJ Herrmann — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:34:06 +0000

I heard the news this morning that Hillary Clinton was dropping out of the Democratic primary race. As soon as I could, I went to Managing News where I’m tracking news about the candidates to see what was happening.

Right away I noticed that one keyword in particular received a huge spike: the Associated Press. Here’s a screenshot showing the jump in mentions of the AP today compared to the last two weeks in the political news I’m tracking.

The AP had been mentioned in about 0.5% of the stories pulled in by Managing News over the last two weeks. Today that figure jumped over ten-fold to 5.3%.

So why was there suddenly so much traffic around the Associated Press? The AP was reporting that Clinton will concede the nomination to Obama this evening after the results come in from Montana and South Dakota, and a lot of other sources were citing them on this.

That story drew an immediate retraction from Clinton campaign spokesperson Terry McAuliffe (who, as you can see shown in blue below, saw his own bump in mentions today).

War vs. War: Funny Keyword Accuracy

Eric Gundersen — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:00:06 +0000

Last week I spent some time reviewing the accuracy of our keyword tracking on one of our development versions of Managing News. We've been testing auto tagging engines, from our internal artificial intelligence system and more recently Calais (formally known as ClearForest before Reuters bought it last year) to figure out what gives us the most accurate keywords.

I decided to look at some political candidates in the south to see whether or not they were being associated with the Iraq war. Of course, good and accurate tracking of an issue like this also means looking at how the media uses the word "war" with current events. So now for your moment of Zen, the most ridiculous find of the day.

+1 for improved accuracy. However, my apologies go out to all the CNN viewers who had to watch that.