In time for Halloween and the presidential election, the TechStars-backed startup, which enables companies to track and reward consumers for their engagement across social, mobile and online platforms, mined millions of social data points (primarily from Facebook) to look for connections between brands of chocolate and political parties.

They found that people who like non-premium chocolates, such as Hersheys, Reese’s and M&Ms are more likely to identify themselves as Democrats than those who prefer premium chocolates, such as Nestle, Dove, Ghirardelli and Lindt.

For example, consumers with an expressed preference for Lindt chocolate are 40 percent more likely to be a Republican and those who say they like Hersheys are 70 percent more likely to be a Democrat, CrowdTwist says.

Clearly, this isn’t the kind of data with election-changing implications and the connection between chocolate preferences and political affiliation likely just reflects differences in age. Younger people tend to skew Democrat and CrowdTwist’s data shows that younger consumers seem to prefer less premium (cheaper) brands while older consumers gravitate toward more expensive brands.

But it still provides an amusing reminder for brands that seemingly unrelated streams of social data can be combined to generate potentially helpful insights.

“[We] aggregate data from various disparate sources and give clients the ability to look at the correlations in data that they have not thought of in the past that they can use to not only find new audiences but understand audiences better,” said Adam Trisk, CrowdTwist’s head of marketing.

For example, he said, this sort of information could help brands determine where and when to buy media: Lindt may think about buying spots on Fox News while Hershey may seek ad buys during the  Democratic National Convention.

CrowdTwist, which raised $6 million in Series A funding last September, said it’s doubled its headcount to 25 since the end of 2011 and surpassed its 2011 revenue by August of this year.  Its clients range from television networks, such as Fox (for a campaign for the “X Factor” show), to sports franchises, like the Miami Dolphins and the NFL, to top brands in consumer packaged goods, like Pepsi, to VPG, a maker of wheelchair-accessible vehicles.

While brands have long valued loyalty, CrowdTwist really takes advantage of new platforms, such as social and mobile, to help brands comprehensively track engagement and reward consumers with real experiences and tangible items.

The startup not only gives data-hungry companies a broad picture of their consumers, it helps brands present themselves as a unified whole to consumers who interact with them in physical locations, online, on television and through other mediums.

“Companies think of their various channels in potentially more siloed, cordoned off verticals,” said co-founder and CEO Irving Fain. “But when a customer looks at that brand it’s all the “X Factor,” the Dolphins, etc. We provide the ability to unify customer interactions back to an individual, which brands can use to build better relationships and experiences with customers and fans – that’s what leads to loyalty.”

Image by Kesu via Shutterstock.

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A new study on social media and civic engagement from the Pew Internet & American Life Project released Friday compares social media behavior between Democrats, Republicans and independents. Among its findings it said that while 52 percent of liberal Democrats who use social media have used the “like” button, 42 percent of conservative Republicans have done so. Overall, Pew said that 38 percent of people who use social media “like” content related to political or social issues.

In general, the study, which included more than 2,200 adults of voting age or older, found that 66 percent of American adults who use social media –- or 39 percent of all American adults –- have done at least one of eight civic or political activities on social media. Not so surprisingly, the more partisan social media users are more likely than their moderate peers to use social networks for political purposes. Also (not so surprisingly), the study found that younger users are more vocal about their political leanings online than older social media users over 50.

Even though liberal Democrats tend to “like” more online, Pew reports that conservative Republicans are also quite active in social media and aren’t bested by Democrats on every social media action. For example, while 39 percent of Republicans have reposted content in social media, 34 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of independents have done the same.  In general, 33 percent of social media have used tools for this purpose, the report said. Conservative Republicans (32 percent) also use social media to follow elected representatives in greater numbers than liberal Democrats (27 percent).

You can check out the full report here and see a few more findings from Pew below:

• 35 percent of social media users have used social media to encourage people to vote. Democrats who use social media are more likely to have used social media to encourage voting — 42 percent have done that compared with 36 percent of Republican social media users and 31 percent of independents.

• 34 percent of social media users have used the tools to post their own political or social thoughts and comments. Liberal Democrats who use social media (42 percent) and conservative Republicans (41 percent) are especially likely to use social media for this purpose.

• 31 percent of social media users have used social media to encourage other people to take action on a political or social issue that is important to them. Democrats lead on this action with 36 percent, followed by Republicans with 34 percent and independents with 29 percent.

• 28 percent of social media users have posted links to political stories or articles for others to read. 39 percent of liberal Democrats have done this, as have 34 percent of conservative Republicans.

• 21 percent of those who use social networks or Twitter belong to a social networking group involved in political or social issues.

Image by SFerdon via Shutterstock.

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In the past, any truly public analysis of the performance of the candidates had to wait until the event was over, when the usual political operatives and pundits like former Clinton advisor James Carville would be called on by CNN or Fox News to pick a winner, criticize the moderator, or handicap future debates. We’ve always had real-time, horse-race-style discussion of these events, but it has almost always taken place in small groups — in bars, or at local viewing events, etc. Never before has there been a way to eavesdrop on a giant conversation about such a thing as it happens.

Game-time commentary: Good or bad?

That kind of game-time handicapping is great fun when it’s the Super Bowl, or the Academy Awards, or some other event with less at stake (although football fans might disagree about that description). But presidential debates — in theory, at least — are supposed to be important elements in the political process, which help undecided voters make up their minds and therefore can ultimately affect the course of political history. Does Twitter help or harm that process?

Hey Obama -- TRAIN WITH HILLARY. This is ROCKY III and she's your Apollo Creed. #eyeofthetiger

—
Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) October 04, 2012

Some would argue the political process is something of a circus anyway, and that carefully stage-managed events like the debates are already a sideshow with little political value — and therefore the additional theatrical element added by real-time commentary isn’t going to have much effect. Many parts of the process are probably also ephemeral, and likely to die out relatively quickly: will there be long-term political repercussions from Mitt Romney’s mention of shutting down PBS, fueled by all of the parody accounts devoted to Big Bird and other characters that Twitter produced? Unlikely.

An optimist would say there is something very real to be gained by having people watch such debates for any reason — even if it’s just to follow along with the wisecracks on Twitter — because then at least there is a chance they might accidentally become more informed about political issues. According to Twitter’s graph of discussions during the debate, some of the biggest peaks in tweets-per-minute came when the two candidates were discussing Medicare. Were most of those jokes or partisan attacks, or did they actually contribute to anyone’s understanding of the issues? That’s hard to say.

The spin cycle is now measured in minutes

The rise of Twitter as a political force has definitely accelerated the metabolism of a campaign by orders of magnitude, to the point where political analysts now talk about a news cycle that is measured in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. Is that ultimately a good thing for politics or democracy? Some have argued that it is beneficial in part because trumped-up stories or blind alleys can be defused much more quickly, or burn themselves out rather than dominating the spin cycle. But a chorus of Twitter responses can also add fuel to something that might not actually be meaningful.

“I can’t watch a debate anymore without having my iPhone in my hand. I don’t feel like I’m having the full experience if I’m not reading the reaction in real time.” — NBC News chief digital officer Vivian Schiller

On the plus side, some pointed out that Twitter users watching television and following along with the real-time discussion were clearly better off than the professional journalists who were attending the debate — and theoretically were supposed to provide some kind of expert analysis later — since all of those reporters were stuck in a separate room with a balky audio and video feed. And as Alex Howard at O’Reilly noted, it might have changed the debate in some interesting ways if some of the smart commentary and questions from Twitter users had actually made it into the debate itself.

During the debate, even some Obama supporters (at least the ones in my stream) seemed to quickly come to the conclusion that the President was off his game, that he was tired or even uninterested, and that Romney gained the upper hand by being more forceful. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith actually declared Romney the winner only 42 minutes into the event. Those impressions were then reinforced by the pundits on the post-game talk shows. Within an hour, the story of the debate seemed to be that Obama had “lost” and Romney had “won,” even though some said the Republican candidate contradicted himself at a number of points.

Is any of that going to have a lasting effect on voters’ decisions, or the way that the campaigns react? Or is it just ephemera that will be gone in a matter of days, as Twitter users become infatuated with some other celebrity event or perceived injustice? It’s clear that for both voters and politicians, and the political operatives who run their campaigns, the Twitter-sphere’s instantaneous reaction to events is a reality they have to take into account — and it could be changing the way we engage with political issues in some important ways. Whether that’s good or bad remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Aih and Shutterstock/iQoncept

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And yet I struggled to pinpoint exactly what I disliked about it.

There was the product stuff. When I logged into Menshn (which I couldn’t do from the U.K. without using a proxy) I found it was awkward to use, extremely narrow in its focus and full of little glitches and slightly unintuitive moments. And the community wasn’t great: people making bad political jokes in a forum meant to discuss Obama or Romney’s candidacies. The inevitable torrent of “Vote Ron Paul” spam. But, hey, let’s give them a break: it’s an early product, so you expect bugs and problems and early communities are hard. So that wasn’t it.

And then there was the personal stuff. The fact that it was started by a controversy-baiting politician, who is written about regularly by a lazy press for having built up a large (but not huge) Twitter following, maybe? Or the fact that it was built by a political campaigns manager who has been accused of inflating his position? There was also the somewhat distasteful fact that both of them have proven a mercenary streak by switching parties when it seemed convenient. But that wasn’t it either.

It wasn’t even the fact that Mensch’s track record on social networks is patchy at best: after the riots in London last year, she even called for Twitter and Facebook to be taken down during moments of ‘national emergency’.

No, amazingly, it was something else.

After a little reflection, I realized it wasn’t any of the tangible things I could think of that made me think Menshn was a bad idea. It was something far more simple: the idea itself.

You see, one of the best things about Twitter is the way subjects can morph and change and speed past you. The serendipity, the openness and the say-whatever-you-want chatter allows to it roam free.

And one of the worst things on Twitter is the people who tell you you’re doing it wrong.

If I think you retweet too much, or I don’t like your style, or you always talk about yourself, or you’re not fun, then I’ll just stop following you. But I don’t think I’d ever presume to tell anyone that they were doing Twitter wrong. I’m not your parent. I may not even be your audience.

Yet here you have Mensch, a politician who is supposed to be paid to represent her constituents, and she’s not just telling you that she thinks she knows how you should be using Twitter — she’s actually using her position and notoriety to actually launch an entire business that tells you that you’re using Twitter wrong.

It’s not that I think Twitter’s perfect. I agree with Om that Twitter’s search data is their greatest opportunity, but I also think it’s the thing they get the most wrong. I’d love to be able to conduct better, deeper searches. I want to see better tools for curating conversations and connecting tweets together. However, just because you find it hard to search for people talking about the same things as you, you don’t need to build an entire copycat service focused on your niche topic. It confuses the need to reduce the noise with the desire to have better discoverability.

Ultimately, it’s just such a typical politician’s attitude towards a problem: You’re wrong. We know better.

That’s enough for me to switch off, thanks.

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The data scientists behind Yahoo’s ”The Signal” blog, who follow the various prediction markets very closely, are projecting Romney will 7 of 10 states tomorrow, with Santorum likely to win two (the conservative bastions of Oklahoma and Tennessee) and Newt Gingrich taking his home state of Georgia.

Most important in terms of winning the Republican nomination, however, is the state of Ohio, which Yahoo’s David Rothschild points out presents an interesting case study in whether polls are still the best method for gauging public opinion. As I explained recently, social media specialists with big data mastery feel they can do a better job of assessing public opinion than can traditional surveys, and Rothschild seems to think prediction markets’ big data prowess puts them ahead of pollsters in figuring out who will win elections. ”Romney has 81.6 percent odds in the crown jewel, Ohio, though polls—which lag compared to markets—have him virtually tied with Santorum,” he wrote.

And while the numbers don’t bode well for Santorum tomorrow, he’s also  taking a hammering in public opinion. Here’s what Fizziology, which performs sentiment analysis across Twitter, Facebook and blogs, had to say about recent sentiment on Santorum:

Rick Santorum is currently seeing the highest percentage of negative conversation surrounding a GOP candidate that we’ve ever tracked. People are beginning to express their discontent more organically as seen with neutral conversation falling, and negative and positive conversation rising. Santorum is currently receiving much of his negative sentiment towards his morals and values, as they are seen by many as being outdated (Sample: “you should only vote for rick santorum… if you live in 1963”). A big negative conversation topic towards Santorum was latest statement that if we were to be President, he would nullify all current samesex marriages (Sample: “Santorum backs nullifying existing gay marriages – http://t.co/eBOrcMrH // yeah not in my lifetime Tricky Ricky. #Frothy #bigot #Santorum”). The social conversation suggests that Santorum, missing his window in Michigan, is seeing support erode.

The prediction markets actually agree, as Yahoo’s Rothschild noted. After winning Michigan and Arizona last week, Romney’s chances for taking the nomination have soared to over 80 percent.

One thing to watch for is whether Gingrich can pull a rabbit out of his hat and actually prove the oddsmakers wrong by winning more than one state. Fizziology noted that Gingrich has seen a sharp increase in positive sentiment lately along with a decrease in negative sentiment. Anyone who follows U.S. politics should recognize that’s a big deal, because while negative sentiment can come from anyone — often from the other party — positive sentiment suggests potential primary voters are actually in Gingrich’s camp.

As I said previously when covering another post on “The Signal” about potential vice-presidential picks, I’m willing to accept these numbers and predictions as factually accurate, but that accuracy can be short-lived. Presidential politics can change course with the wind, and one more big Romney gaffe or a new, big-name candidate riding into town on his (or her) white stallion could change the discussion completely.

Update: The sheer volume of tweets about the candidates seems to back up what the prediction markets and Fizziology are seeing. Here’s a graph from Twitter showing Romney leading in volume and Gingrich experiencing a sharp spike in the past couple days.

Feature image courtesy of MittRomney.com; graphs courtesy of Fizziology.

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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)

According to a predictive analysis experiment by a Yahoo data scientist, U.S. voters can expect to see either a Mitt Romney-Chris Christie or a Newt Gingrich-Marco Rubio ticket to face off against Obama-Biden in this year’s presidential election. The experiment, which author David Pennock explained on Yahoo’s The Signal blog Monday morning, highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of using web data to predict human behavior.

The point of Pennock’s experiment is to determine likely vice-presidential candidates based on what the web is saying. He found there’s a 25 percent chance Romney would pick Christie, currently the governor of New Jersey, whereas there’s a 30 percent chance Gingrich would choose Florida senator Rubio. Interestingly, although Romney and Rubio are anti-correlated (i.e., Rubio’s chance of being VP go down as Romney’s chances of being president rise, and vice versa), Rubio is so popular there’s still a 22 percent chance Romney would choose him. Christie, on the other hand, sees his chances drop to a mere 5 percent if Gingrich wins the Republican nomination.

Essentially, Pennock is using data from prediction services Intrade and PredictWise on who’s the most-likely VP, and extrapolating from there to determine who might get the nod if any given candidate wins the nomination. Statistically, Pennock’s conclusions are probably accurate, but he does make sure to note they’re just the result of “a statistical correspondence, and an extrapolated one at that, not a proven cause-effect relationship.”

For example, Pennock claims the results “are based solely on data unaided–and untainted–by political intuition,” but that’s not necessarily the case. Depending on what data sources he, Intrade and PredictWise are using, political intuition could play a major role in who’s correlated with whom. If my gut, no matter how uninformed, tells me Marco Rubio would be a great vice-presidential candidate and I write it or tweet it, I’ve likely influenced the data set with my intuitions, however data-driven the analysis itself is.

Furthermore, there’s really no accounting for the human brain. Although Intrade had Sarah Palin as John McCain’s likely VP candidate on the day she was announced, its confidence varied greatly throughout the day as rumors swirled, and I’m guessing it didn’t have her rated highly this far out. Who knows what will change between now and August and whose name will start cropping up? Actually, Intrade has the chances of Palin being picked this year at .2 percent as I write this, but perhaps she’ll surge again over the summer.

Predictive models can be very beneficial, and I think Pennock’s analysis (as well as those from Intrade and PredictWise) is very telling about reality as it exists now. But unlike in the world of machine data, where a series of particular events might be highly suggestive of a particular outcome down the road, reality can change in a hurry when fickle humans are involved.

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The site will also stream the entire debate live online through its YouTube Live platform, in addition to it being broadcast on TV. The stream will be accompanied by live comment feeds from YouTube and Twitter, as well as various data visualizations through Google Maps and other gadgets.

This debate is only one of many initiatives planed by YouTube to cover the elections. Last week, the site unveiled YouTube Town Hall, a kind of virtual debate platform that has select members of congress square off on issues ranging from education to the war in Afghanistan. Each candidate explains his position in a one-minute video, and users can then select which side they support. YouTube only reveals the party affiliations of participating politicians after users have cast their votes, and the site will let its users propose and vote on future questions.

Don't sit behind a wooden desk: Tom Udal (Dem.) is trying to appeal to YouTube's users.

YouTube convinced representatives like John McCain (R-Ariz.), Tom Udall (D-N.M.), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to participate in the first round of Town Hall questions. In some cases, it took a little bit of gentle coaching to make sure that the videos appeal to the site’s audience. “Don’t sit behind a wooden desk with an American flag in the background,” Raghavan said was one piece of advice that the site is giving participating politicians.

But in general, politicians have become very YouTube-savvy. Raghavan told me 92 percent of the members of Congress now have their own YouTube channel. Most of the current presidential candidates announced their intent to run for the highest office with a YouTube video, and Ron Paul even streamed his first campaign event live on the site. YouTube only officially launched its live streaming platform in April, and it has so far only been available to a few hand-picked partners. However, we shouldn’t be too surprised to see more politics on YouTube Live. “I would love to see all candidates use the live streaming platform,” said Raghavan.

A tag cloud made by YouTube Trends to visualize the questions YouTube users had for President Obama on the subject of health care. Similar visualizations could accompany the YouTube-sponsored Republican primary debate in January 2012.

Speaking of the GOP’s hopefuls: The January 12 debate isn’t the first time YouTube has offered its users a chance to participate in a high-profile election event. The site contributed to two primary debates in 2007, which were organized by CNN. YouTube users were challenged to record their questions on video. CNN showed a few select videos on air and then asked the candidates to answer these questions.

The selection process wasn’t without hiccups, however. The Republican primary debate included a video recorded by an advisor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which resulted in some bias claims afterwards. This time around, YouTube doesn’t want to rely on so much editorial guidance from its media partners: PBS NewsHour and the Des Moines Register. The site will let its users vote directly on which questions to ask, Raghavan told me.

Of course, that doesn’t mean interest groups won’t try to get their foot in the door and hijack this kind of grassroots process. President Obama’s recent live Q&A at Facebook provoked countless marijuana legalization activists to flock to the site and completely take over the comment section, which was intended to gather a wide variety of questions. Raghavan said YouTube is conscious of these efforts. However, she was convinced the scale of Google and YouTube help to thwart any astro-turfing attempts.

Grassroots or not, YouTube will undoubtedly be once again embraced by candidates and interest groups alike. During previous elections, campaigns started to use so-called trackers to follow the competition around from event to event and then immediately upload any potentially damaging footage to YouTube. This kind of video coverage was put into the spotlight when then-Senator George Allen called a tracker of the competition “makaka” in 2006 — a moment credited with costing him the reelection.

“We are already seeing a lot of campaign videos,” said Kevin Alloca in our interview. Alloca has been tracking these phenomena as part of his work on YouTube Trends, and Raghavan added she fully expects major political moments to once again emerge from YouTube then find their way into mainstream media. “Part of the excitement of YouTube is that it unfolds in real time,” she said.

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Updated. We know that TV networks black out sporting events, but can you black out an entire election? In Canada you can — or at least the government there is trying to do that, for the national election on Monday. According to an ancient provision in the country’s Election Act, the results of the polls can’t be reported in any way until all of the polls across the entire nation are closed. That even extends to posting or re-posting results on blogs, Twitter and Facebook. If this strikes you as ridiculous and/or unachievable, then you know something Canadian officials are trying to ignore: information technology has moved far beyond the law’s ability to deter it.

Coincidentally, we’ve just had a powerful lesson in how news of all kinds is disseminated now, with the death Sunday night of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a U.S. military strike in Pakistan. Within minutes of the announcement that President Barack Obama would be making an address to the American public, hundreds of people were retweeting the fact that bin Laden had been killed — and it wasn’t just a rumor, but a reliable report from the former chief of staff to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. By the time it was confirmed by The New York Times and CNN, it seemed almost anti-climactic. That is what news is like now, as Emily Bell at the Columbia Journalism School notes.

The reality is that before social media came along, it was relatively easy to control the flow of information — about election results or pretty much anything else — because (in Canada at least) there were only a few major TV networks and a few major news entities. Tell them not to report something, and they would obey. Problem solved! But the tens of millions of people using Twitter and Facebook aren’t likely to bow to those kinds of constraints quite so easily, if they even know about them at all. Many of them may not even be located in Canada, and are therefore beyond the reach of the law (full disclosure: I am Canadian).

Some Twitter users have said they plan to defy the ban. There’s even a website called Tweet the Results, which plans to aggregate any tweets that use the hashtag #tweettheresults — regardless of whether those tweets contain early poll information or not. The site, created by social-media consultants Alexandra Samuel and Darren Barefoot, says that as far as it is concerned “We are not publishing the results ourselves, we’re just collecting what others have said.” It remains to be seen what Elections Canada thinks of this behavior.

Update: Tweet The Results has taken down the page where it was aggregating tweets, and replaced it with a notice that says it did so “rather than face a potential fine or protracted legal battle.” It also says:

We never imagined a day when Canadians would have to use a foreign website to participate in a conversation about our own country. We never imagined that we, Canadian citizens, would potentially face legal penalties for our role in supporting an online conversation.

The Canada Election Act provision in question has been around since 1938, when state-of-the-art communications technology consisted of the telephone, the telegraph and the carrier pigeon. But it’s not just some dusty sub-clause no one pays any attention to: in 2000, a blogger was charged with an offense for reporting early results on his blog in the Maritimes (the Atlantic time zone) before the polls had closed in the Pacific time zone, and fined $1,000. The case was fought all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada in 2007, at which point the blogger lost in a split decision (the clause in question actually provides for maximum fines of up to $25,000 and up to five years in prison).

Elections Canada, the department in charge of running the actual polls, has taken pains to warn bloggers and anyone using Twitter and Facebook that they could be liable for these penalties, even if all they do is re-tweet someone else who mentions the early poll results.

And how will they enforce this? Has Elections Canada set up a NASA-style command center with hawk-eyed operatives scanning dozens of screens and filtering the social media-sphere for illicit conversations? Well, no. The department says that it will be relying on complaints from the public in order to pursue any legal actions. But it does plan to pursue them. Meanwhile, the law is in the process of being challenged by several media outlets in Canada, and a number of experts have testified about how ludicrous it is — including law professor Michael Geist, whose affidavit to the court is here (PDF link).

Eventually, one hopes, the law will either be removed or simply never be enforced — like the one that requires every British male over the age of 14 to engage in two hours of long-bow practice every day.

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Jennifer Moo

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It may not be quite as big a deal as the presidential elections in 2008, when Barack Obama’s campaign team used social media and social networks to mobilize supporters and win the White House, but the mid-term state elections happening tomorrow have some of their own social tools — including a special Foursquare badge, a Facebook “get out the vote” challenge, and a geo-location app for tracking voter interest. There’s also a cool Twitter visualization from the programmer-journalists at the New York Times and an analysis of whether the number of Twitter followers a candidate has can predict who will win the election.

Foursquare maps: As we’ve noted before, the location-based service has been gradually extending its virtual game-world of badges and achievements into the real world, and the special election badge it has created is another example. But it’s not just a badge — Foursquare is planning to track activity and display it in real time on a map, and says it sees the mid-term elections as a kind of training ground for the national elections in 2012.

Vote with a check-in: GeoPollster is another election visualization app based on Foursquare: You select which political party you currently support, and then each time you “check in” at a Foursquare venue, GeoPollster counts your check-in as a vote for that party. The site then tracks votes across the various states based on activity. Obviously this isn’t likely to correlate with actual voting patterns, but it does produce funny headlines like “Democrats seize control of LL Bean outlet in Pittsburgh.”

Challenge your friends! Organizing for America has a Facebook app called The Commit to Vote Challenge that is aimed at getting people to publicly display their intention to vote, and to challenge their friends and acquaintances to vote as well. According to the site, the average user who commits to vote via the app has passed along the message to 10 of their friends, and nearly a third of those who have committed to vote and provided a reason for it are first-time voters.

Twitter bubble view: The programmers at the New York Times have done some fascinating data visualization in the past, and this time they have come up with a real-time view of Twitter activity that looks at tweets that come from, are directed to and are about each of the candidates. Bubbles grow and shrink depending on the volume of activity. What does it mean? We’re not sure, but it’s fun to watch. The Washington Post has also bought the hashtag #election as a “promoted trend,” Twitter said in a blog post.

Do followers = voters? Dan Zarrella, a social-marketing researcher, looked at the official Twitter accounts for 30 senate, governor and house of representatives candidates, and then correlated the number of followers with the performance of those specific candidates in early polls. In more than 70 percent of cases, the candidate with the most followers was also ahead in the polls. Of course, this suffers from the “correlation vs. causation” problem — did the leaders get more followers because they were leading, or were they leading because they had more followers? Klout has come up with a similar ranking of candidates based on their Twitter influence score.

Get local: Not to be left out of the action, Google has a mobile app/website that will show you where your polling station is and keep you up to date on any news related to your area. And we wrote recently about a Senate candidate whose programmer son came up with an election game that uses Facebook Places check-ins as way of encouraging people to get out and vote. Fred Trotter said that he hoped using social networks would help the U.S. move away from a brand of politics based on heavily financed interest groups and polarized viewpoints on the major issues.

We’re not sure whether that will actually happen or not, but it looks as though the “gamification” of elections is increasing, for better or worse — so go out and get your badge.

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If you’re running IE 5.01, 6, or 7, you’ll want to grab the update direct from Microsoft and put your mind at ease. And commence comments of “No, you should switch to [insert browser name here]…” in 3, 2, 1… GO! ;)

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