Tracking Political Buzz in the US

Having difficulty keeping up with the political scene in the US? It's almost as hard to keep up with the various blog analysis tools that are cropping up to help you figure it out. Here is a selection:

• Wonkosphere (Crawdad): Produced by the text mining folks at Crawdad, this site gives a reasonably nice presentation of buzz per candidate as well as links to posts from red/blue blogs. They scan about 1200 blogs and are currently getting about 300 visitors per day.
• Opinion BuzzTracker (Fox): Updated every hour, this page - which is somewhat noisily presented - ranks news articles by the number of inlinks from blogs. The articles are from a number of different sources.
• PoliticalTrends (Lexalytics): Scanning 290 blogs, this site provides buzz breakdown for candidates and topics. It includes an interesting feature which determines the left/right leaning of a blog. Like the Crawdad site, this is essentially a demo site for Lexalytics.
• SiloBreaker: This news aggregation and analysis site (not only scoped to political discussion) is best described as a new way to connect users with online news data.
• CNN/Umbria: Umbria and CNN reprise their relationship from the 2004 election with an offering that is centred more around hand written reports derived from analytics. The 2004 version focused on automatically generated reports. Reading this gives one both the raw data and the colour of a writers interpretation.

Comments

[Andrew Coffey]

Thanks for the link to politicaltrends.info site.
We are going to add a live IPTV townhall feature soon.
The heads-on the other sites was good.
Andrew
Coffey
politicaltrends.info and mn1.com

[CHad]

One site that is very interesting is www.spartaninternet.com/2008, they run an algorithm to quantify how each candidate is doing online. Rather than looking at one specific area, they claim to use 650 different factors.

As a marketing guy, this is a unique approach to measuring the net. Check it out, its a least worth a look.