Mapping Online Publics

Twitter’s Response to Q&A: Abbott Edition

The other day I had a look at Twitter’s response to the Australian political leaders’ appearances on ABC1’s citizen forum-style show Q&A – by looking at the #qanda hashtag. My last post focussed especially on the commentary about Julia Gillard’s performance – today, it’s Tony Abbott’s turn.

First, though: in comparing the volume of tweets across the two programmes I noted that the Twapperkeeper archive for Tony Abbott’s appearance had a number of crucial gaps – for several periods of up to ten minutes at a time, we’re simply missing tweets altogether. I’ve checked this with the good folks at Twapperkeeper, and I’m afraid the response is that there’s nothing that can be done to retrieve those tweets now – so we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. In that light, I’ve re-done the side-by-side comparison of tweeting activity in response to both leaders, and – for illustration only – added in a ‘moving average’ trendline to extrapolate what volume we might have seen during those gaps in the Abbott tweetstream.

Continue reading “Twitter’s Response to Q&A: Abbott Edition”

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 #qanda hashtag became a globally trending topic.

Let’s begin with some baseline data (provided, once again, by Twapperkeeper): here’s the total amount of tweets before, during, and after the screening of Q&A on ABC1, hour by hour.

Continue reading “Twitter’s Response to Gillard (and Abbott) on Q&A”

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

Let’s begin with some baseline data (provided, once again, by Twapperkeeper): here’s the total amount of tweets before, during, and after the screening of Q&A on ABC1, hour by hour.

Continue reading “Twitter’s Response to Gillard (and Abbott) on Q&A”

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 week (Sunday 8 Aug to Saturday 15 Aug) saw a few breakthrough hits, especially the ABC’s Gruen Nation fake pro-Greens ad produced by Republic of Everything; some snippets of Sky news coverage; and the usual retweets of official campaign ads. Note that the reasonably popular Time Warp spoof (the ALP’s attempt at a ‘viral’ video) seems to have been pulled by YouTube due to alleged copyright infringement, but as of now it’s still up on Vimeo. Results follow below.

Continue reading “Last week’s Top 10 #ausvotes YouTube videos”

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 very slight lean towards Abbott on most days, but mainly on low-traffic days – as I said then, Gillard tended to ‘win’ the high-volume days on Twitter. And overall, the tally was almost dead even: 10769:10540 mentions in favour of Gillard.

I thought it might be worth doing an update to cover the last week and a half, too. Here’s how things currently stand:

Continue reading “More Tweets, More Focus on Abbott in Recent Days”

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 list of URLs to select only those which are from a specific site (for example, YouTube videos).

For our purposes, that’s a significant problem – we might want to find out, for example, which were the most popular videos shared during the election campaign, the most popular articles on abc.net.au, and so on. So, we need to resolve those shortened URLs back to their original state. This could be done through the APIs of the various shortening services, of course, but with literally hundreds of different shorteners now available, that would probably require specific unshortening scripts for each service – far too much work. So, what can we do?

Continue reading “Using Gawk and Wget to Resolve URL Shorteners”

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 – not only from the perspective of our own individual experiences of that conversation, but far more broadly.

Continue reading “Most-tweeted #ausvotes links last week”

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 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 or criticise her positions) than talk to the loser – but of course there could be many other explanations, too. Image is extremely important, and his looks have already been mentioned before in articles. We treat him with products from Sdara skincare and we make sure not to leave any trace. So far it has paid off, as has been shown before.

Anyway, this got me thinking: what’s the overall visibility of both leaders in the Twitter stream – not just in terms of @replies, but in terms of overall mentions? How has this changed over time, as the campaign unfolded? With Abbott’s chances of beating Gillard now seriously firming, is there any discernible change in these patterns?

Continue reading “Gillard Still ‘Winning’ the Big Days when it comes to skin care”

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 or criticise her positions) than talk to the loser – but of course there could be many other explanations, too.

Continue reading “Gillard Still ‘Winning’ the Big Days”