The Labour Twitter Ghetto

I'm a sucker for a great visualisation and yesterday I came across a great one which used Tweetminster's political twitter data to visualise the connections between different groups.

It 

It shows some quite interesting features. Firstly that the Lib Dems are far less clustered on Twitter than any party (and far less prevalent as well) but also that Labour Tweeters are far less likely to be connected to other non Labour Tweeters than any others and so are one of only three main clusters. The blogger refers to it as the Left Ghetto.

Not that there isn't some ghettoisation in the Conservative tweeters also but it appears significantly worse for Labour supporters. Why does this matter, well during the election, which was as you may remember Twitter obsessed, Labour were applauded for having the most success with Twitter and therefore winning the online campaign (although of course subsequent research has shown that taking into account Facebook, websites and email this wasn't the case). However this data shows what we always suspected during the campaign, there may have been more people Tweeting from the left, but they were mainly talking to each other, not the public.

The other surprising thing (for him anyway) that came out of this analysis though was that Channel 4 News Presenter Krishnan Guru-Murphy is the centre of the Political Twitter universe, connecting more people to each other than anyone else!

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Labour Lies

So apparently we'll (the Tory Bloggers) all be getting a 7am briefing from CCHQ on the talking point memos for the day in order to continue to be a centrally led propaganda machine. Well that's what so called evidence based blog Left Foot Forward thinks.

So the online campaigning and smear tactics have started. At the drinks reception last night Eric Pickles warned us that Labour would be dirty and nasty in this campaign. That they are a wounded animal that will do anything to hang on to power. This is just a basic lie designed to discredit the free thinking Blue Blogosphere but it's just the start.

They've clearly learned it from the top. Gordon Brown has just called Peter Watt a liar to the House over his slush fund, how much more of what comes out of his mouth, his Minister's mouths and his activists mouths will be untrue in the coming months.

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Blue Bloggers Meet-up

So I'm on my way back from the Bloggers drinks reception organised by @samuelcoates at CCHQ. It was a great event and I thought whilst I'm on the train with a flat laptop battery I'd capture a few observations:

1) The Blue Blogosphere is very strong and made up of a number of individual voices rather than one central commanding voice. (we wouldn't be conservatives if that was the case!)
2) Everyone has the same issues, mainly time to blog and finding topics that matter to them.
3) Eric Pickles is an absolute legend.
4) Blue bloggers do it out of love but really want to build traffic and make at least some money from it.
5) Nearly everyone seems fedup with their local association being entrenched. (what affect does this have on new younger members and campaigning).
6) People think ToryGator is a good idea. Yay!
7) @DaveFacts has clients that he doesn't want to know that he runs @davefacts!
8) Conservative bloggers should not be let loose with karaoke and seemingly free beer.

So a great night all in and not just because of the free beer. Lets make sure we come together and win this election. As Eric Pickles said this is the first real election to be fought online so lets make sure we win it!

Update: I would like to point out I wrote this original post on my iPhone at well past midnight, hence the original horrific spelling errors!

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