Swarm Creativity Blog

We did some more coolhunting on Twitter over the last few days to check out if the negative advertising blitz against Newt Gingrich that Mitt Romney is running right now in Florida has any impact on the Twittersphere. The answer is “Yes, by all means”, which explains why even in the Romney tweets Gingrich is the most prominent word in the term view, and Gingrich is much more central among twitterers than Romney in the combined Romney-Gingrich view in Florida. To measure that, we collected 4 twitter maps: 1. All the tweets in the US about Gingrich and Romney: As we can see, the twitterers about Gingrich tweet more, and they are also more important. The purple lines are the retweet network containing the words “gingrich” or “romney”. 2. All the tweets in Florida about Gingrich and Romney: In Florida, few people tweet about Romney compared to Gingrich. But let’s now look at what these people tweet about, when they tweet about Gingrich in Florida: This picture has been computed using Condo...

The race to fill Ted Kennedy's vacant senatorial seat in Washington has turned into a real shocker. At the outset, it seemed clear that in deeply democratic Massachusetts only a Democrat could become the next senator. As of today, it seems to be the other way. Republican candidate Scott Brown is ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley by 5 points . I wanted to know what the Web would tell us. The picture below shows the daily betweenness values of the two candidates, we can cleary see how Scott Brown is gaining on Martha Coakley. It seems however, that there is a silver lining for Ms. Coakley, at least in the blogosphere. The next picture shows her centrality as of today (January 15). She is ahead by 6 percentage points. The last picture, just for fun, shows the Blogpost-Network leading to the percentages. The red dots are the Web sites promoting both candidates. The brown dots promote Mr Brown, but it seems that the green (should really be blue) Web sites carry some more weight, leadin...

This weekend the Iranians are electing a new president. Incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad competes against reformist candidates Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohsen Rezaee. It seems that Ahmadinejad's fiery rethoric did little to help him improve his chances to win the elections, at least on the Web. Coolhunting with Condor today for the frontrunner on the Web and the Blogs, once on the entire Web, and once restricted to the "ir" Iranian domain brought a clear picture: not once was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad leading. First the global analysis, searching the entire blogosphere and then the entire Web. It seems as if Mehdi Karroubi would be emerging as the clear leader, at least on the global (uncensored) Internet! Now restricted only to blogs within the Iranian domain: And finally all Web sites within the "ir" Iranian domain: Inside Iran, the three reform candidates are tied with Mir-Hossein Mousavi slightly ahead on blogs, and Mohsen Rezaee the clear leader on th...

Today's attack of Dick Cheney against Colin Powell, who 'd rather choose Rush Limbaugh over Powell prompted me to check what the Web buzz is saying about the Republicans against Democrats, using our CoolTrend application. At first, checking Web buzz at large, I got the expected result: The Democrats lead on the Web, with 53% over 47%. But then I took a closer look at the spiderweb of web links deciding on the percentages of Web buzz. Compared to older pictures, where the Republican Web sites always were closely clustered, while the Democratic Web sites were widely spread out, the Republican Web these days is similarly scattered: This means that a lot of discussion and soul searching is going on in the Republican parts of the Web, with many dissenting opinions, as reflected in today's comment of Cheney on Powell. I then repeated the same query restricted to the blogosphere, because what is said by bloggers today, frequently becomes mainstream opinion tomorrow. I got quite ...