by Chas Danner Forget text-alerts and campaign apps, Wikipedia was the first to predict the 2008 VP choices:
Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia page was updated at least 68 times the day before John McCain announced her selection, with another 54 changes made in the five previous days previous. Tim Pawlenty, another leading contender for McCain’s favor, had 54 edits on August 28th, with just 12 in the five previous days. By contrast, the other likely picks — Romney, Kay Bailey Hutchison — saw far fewer changes. The same burst of last-minute editing appeared on Joe Biden’s Wikipedia page, Terry Gudaitis of Cyveillance, told the Washington Post.
Wikipedia data isn’t the only source for political predictions, Twitter has begun leveraging its stats to get into the polling game as well:
Twitter launched a new service [last] Wednesday called the Twitter Political Index, or Twindex. By applying highly tuned algorithms to Twitter’s fire hose of data, the service offers a real-time look at voters’ moods, and scores which presidential candidate is trending up (and who is trending down) day to day.
The index has proved remarkably similar to other polling and real-world results:
The project began when Twitter noticed that conversations about candidates on its own feeds accurately foreshadowed voter sentiments showing up in traditional polls. For example, during a FoxNews debate broadcast in which viewers were asked to rate candidates’ responses as either “answer” or “dodge,” Twitter saw a profound uptick in positive responses about Newt Gingrich. A few days days later, Gingrich was indeed moving up in the polls, but Twitter could see this shift in real-time, much, much earlier, during the debate. Similarly, in the run-up to the Michigan and Arizona primaries, Twitter saw Mitt Romney’s follower count surge, while Rick Santorum’s sputtered out. When the election results came in, they confirmed what Twitter was seeing internally: Its own social media provided an inside line on what voters were thinking.
Update: The Wikipedia VP prediction probably won’t work out this year:
Let’s all update Carrot Top’s Wikipedia page until we get him into the VP discussion: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot_Top
— Eric Lach (@ericlach) August 7, 2012
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