In preparing for speaking at Personal Democracy Forum 2008 I spoke with a number of colleagues in the social media analysis space asking if they were engaged with any of the presidential or primary campaigns. I didn't hear of any who were.
There was a panel in the morning session today in which a number of staffers from the various campaigns present and past talked about the tools and strategies of campaigning. It was apparent from their answers that they didn't use any real social media analytics systems. They did talk about dealing with lots of email, and building internal systems to help with that. Again, it didn't sound like they were using any text mining tools to help with this.
So, it seems like there is a big opportunity for companies in the social media analysis space, but there is also something of a disappointment in hearing that the politicians are not exploring what can be done with these technologies.
I think a barrier to text mining on the web is simply that the government and politicians already get so much information pushed at them as it is. However, I do think there is interest in using text mining. The research in duplicate detection and identifying stakeholders done by http://erulemaking.ucsur.pitt.edu/ is government funded and at least some of it is used in governmental organizations.
Another conference you may find interesting is http://youtube08election.crowdvine.com/ - its focus is a little more narrow (YouTube and this year's election), but it may be able to generate some interesting results that are, by definition, relevant the current election.
Posted by: Paul Ogilvie | June 24, 2008 at 10:07 AM
"but there is also something of a disappointment in hearing that the politicians are not exploring what can be done with these technologies."
It could be related to ignorance of the technologies, although the cynic in me is more likely to believe they don't really care what people think, so why spend money to get that opinion.
Posted by: Galrahn | June 27, 2008 at 05:35 PM
Hi Matthew,
I'm interested in the ethical application of Social Web Analytics for political progress. I've just written an ebook on SWA, although it was getting a bit too long to comment on the potential for political application... maybe in the 2009 ebook?
Love to know what you think of The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008:
http://www.socialwebanalytics.com.
Includes reference to Blogpulse :-)
Posted by: Philip Sheldrake | July 03, 2008 at 01:29 PM