Political Video Barometer
URL = http://www.shiftingthedebate.com/shifting/videobarometer.html
Description
"While the political social networks of the past allowed campaigns to spread targeted messages, the speed at which new messages spread via online social networks has shortened the media cycle.
Whereas contacts in traditional social networks are typically closely guarded, the advent of blogging and the practice of bloggers using hyperlinks has allowed for the measurement and mapping of these networks.
Through looking at the linking behavior between blogs and the particular sources of content bloggers focus attention on, social networks of bloggers can be identified and mapped.
Campaigns can then use this data both to target supporters for mobilization and to find opportunities for persuading new audiences." (http://www.shiftingthedebate.com/shifting/2008/11/how-campaigning-in-a-web-20-world-differs.html)
"Are messages spreading to new audiences or just "preaching to the choir"? How fast are the messages moving? Is a message spreading through the Internet authentically viral or is it a coordinated campaign that will fade away?
These are the questions that we will address on Shifting The Debate.
To get the conversation going we have built the Political Video Barometer to measure how YouTube videos are moving through the Conservative and Liberal blogs.
Over the last fifteen years the political use of the Internet has evolved from web page campaign brochures into an effective tool to mobilize supporters and raise unprecedented amounts of money. But as the all-but-fixed proportion of campaign spending on TV clearly shows, the remaining holy grail of online politics is persuasion.
One only has to look at email, Facebook or read a blog to see many attempts at political persuasion.
The increased use of tools such as online video has provided a platform to inspire and move people.
Social networking sites, Blogs and Twitter allow for the rapid spread of ideas (as does email for those that still have the time to read it).
So why do political campaigns and issue advocacy groups spend such a small portion of their budget online to shift the debate in their favor?
The answer is one word - Measurement." (http://www.shiftingthedebate.com/shifting/2008/10/who-is-shifting.html)
"how does it work?
The videos shown in the Barometer are chosen by queries against a large database built by network analysis engines from Morningside Analytics. Every few months a crawler (or "spider") visits millions of blogs and collects their contents and links.
Next, a program mines the links in these blogs and, using advanced graph mathematics, groups the blogs based on two criteria: how do blogs link to one-another (primarily via their blog rolls), and, over time, what else do the bloggers link to in common?
These groups are called "Attentive Clusters." Clusters can be large or small, and the bigger ones can contain many sub-clusters and even sub-sub-clusters.
Only after the machines have mapped out the high level clusters, do we bring in some live eyeballs so we can figure out what the blogs in a cluster have in common. But we do not need to look at very many: from as few as 10 to 20 blogs in a cluster, we can determine what the cluster is all about.
As shown on the left, American liberal bloggers and American conservative bloggers form the two largest clusters in the English language blogosphere, and the Barometer draws upon roughly the 8.000 "most linked-to" blogs in each of these clusters to position the videos on the graph.
Still another program feeds the Barometer by scanning these 16,000 blogs every six hours, looking for new links to YouTube videos (or YouTube videos embedded right in the blogs). By counting these links we learn what videos political bloggers are promoting. Some videos are linked to almost exclusively by liberal bloggers, some are linked to mostly by conservative bloggers, and a few are linked to more or less evenly by both groups. Once the program determines that a video has traction in the political clusters, it scans through other parts of the blogospere to count how many "non-political" bloggers link to it as well." (http://www.shiftingthedebate.com/shifting/2008/10/inside-the-baro.html)