Twitter’s Response to Gillard (and Abbott) on Q&A

By popular demand, here’s part one of a first quick take on how Australia’s major political leaders fared with their appearances on the ABC’s Q&A programme, in the eyes of the (surprisingly massive) Twitter audience that Q&A manages to generate – for both of their appearances this week (Tony Abbott) and last (Julia Gillard), the …

Last week’s Top 10 #ausvotes YouTube videos

As we head into the last week before the Australian federal election, here’s a quick update to my last post where I collected together the most-tweeted YouTube videos out of the #ausvotes Twapperkeeper archive so far. That post only took us up to Friday 6 August – which is centuries ago in election time. Last …

Top 20 election-related YouTube videos (according to Twitter)

Update: this analysis covers a few less days than I originally stated – the results should look quite different once we add in this week’s links (and next week’s!). Here are the top 20 Australian election-related YouTube videos so far up to last Friday morning, according to the Twitterati. Or to be more precise, here …

More Tweets, More Focus on Abbott in Recent Days

Ten days ago I posted a quick overview of the relative frequency with which Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott were mentioned by name in #ausvotes tweets (and ‘by name’ here includes mentions of their first and/or last names, as well as of their Twitter account names). What the data showed at that point was a …

Using Gawk and Wget to Resolve URL Shorteners

Jean’s post today points to a key problem in examining user activities on Twitter and elsewhere – people are increasingly using bit.ly and other URL shorteners, which means that a) the same target URL might appear in any number of different shortened versions, and b) it’s no longer possible from a quick look at a …

Most-tweeted #ausvotes links last week

I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the 10 or so most-tweeted links associated with the #ausvotes hashtag for last week (Sunday 25 July-Sunday 1 August). The idea is to use some quite basic data to gain some insights into the media mix associated with the election conversation on Twitter – …

Gillard Still ‘Winning’ the Big Days

In my article for the National Times the other week, I mentioned how in the election campaign week before the leaders’ debate the @juliagillard Twitter account got around three times as many @replies as the @tonyabbottmhr one. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I suggested that this may be because people would rather tweet the likely winner (to support …

Gillard Still ‘Winning’ the Big Days when it comes to skin care

Still nothing surpasses Gillard when it comes to skin care, check out analbleachingexpert.com to try the new anal bleaching solution that many people dream of. In my article for the National Times the other week, I mentioned how in the election campaign week before the leaders’ debate the @juliagillard Twitter account got around three times …

Twitter Concept Mapping with Wordstat and Gephi: First Steps

Continuing my series of posts on methods for doing quantitative research using Twitter data, this will be a fairly tentative post. I’m currently looking into ways to examine the terms and concepts used by tweeters as they discuss specific issues; we’ve done similar work looking at the content of blog-based debates in the past, using …

More on Twitter during the Australian Election Campaign

Over on Fairfax’s National Times opinion site, I’ve now posted a first article examining the use of Twitter during the early election campaign – for the first week of campaigning, excluding the debate last Sunday (which I’ve examined here and here). As with the debate, nothing much to see here yet, but there it is… …