An implication of this list is that election campaigns nowadays function as spectacles rather than contests. An opinion poll measures the level of support for a candidate — who is likely to win or lose. This list tries to capture its intensity instead — the viral activity a candidate stimulates.

The corollary in campaign coverage is the discrediting of so-called Horse Race journalism and the development of a replacement that I call Reality Gameshow journalism. In 2008 it isSurvivor not Seabiscuit.

Regards — Tyndall

I need to explore this some more but I’m interested in the varying responses through different media, for example, Obama’s stronger showing on You Tube than through blogs, It’s telling us something significant, I think, about how the use of internet media is changing amongst a young generation.

Your use of the CPC found in Google to show demand seems to be very off. While I see what you are trying to do, CPCs are not just based on bid amount and has to do with relevancy and historical CTRs among others. Back in the old days when relative position was based on bid, you could have maybe learned something from average CPC. Perhaps looking at the number of bidders in the morning a few days might be a better judge of which names are garnering demand.

Cheers,

Eric

Further, the markets you mention are not representative. How many families from east LA and Harlem, WV hill country, TX ranchers, college students from city/state college have funded up their InTrade accounts?

I find Technorati and Blogpulse too unwieldy, and rarely precise enpough. I recommend PresidentialWatch08.com (http://presidentialwatch08.com/index.php/trends/). Doesn’t work for everything under the sun, but it’s pretty interesting when it comes to the presidential race itself. Not that blog trends are significant per se, but they got it about right, for Iowa and NH for the republicans at least.

A poll is MUCH more reliable than, say, the number of Google searches. You’ve gotten your knickers all in a twist over the mistakes in New Hampshire in the Democratic poll, and completely overlooked the fact that the polls were quite reliable in the GOP race there. And in both races in Iowa. Perhaps your takeaway here is the 25 percent of polls (one of the four I mentioned above) are unreliable.

Think about this: Polling is not absolute science, but a kind prediction. It assumes that whatever prediction is made it will definitely be wrong 5% of the time or thereabouts just because that’s the amount of random error in the world. And then there is additional margin of error depending on the sample size, the type of questions asked, the variation in the results.

So having a handful of polls go wrong doesn’t invalidate all polling; the statistics admit that such a thing is quite possible.

What’s more interesting is what you posted about earlier, that there may be something specifically related to the Democratic election in NH that caused the pattern in polling errors. You were much closer to the real issues there.

You do this kind of anti-polling burp every four years. Look back at your old posts and see if you find something similar from the last big election.

Primaries are more difficult to predict than general elections.

Just because more Undecideds voted for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire than expected doesn’t mean polls are discredited.

I’d be more interested in reading a poll about the South Carolina primary than reading how many Google searches for a candidate’s name came from South Carolina.

–
P.J. Hinton