The Results: #AskObama Town Hall analyzed | Hacker News Reader

The Results: #AskObama Town Hall analyzed

obama.twitsprout.com

68 pointsmichaelrlitt19 comments

During the interview http://askobama.twitter.com/ at 42m20s, they claim that 10% of the questions are on Education, whereas twitsprout shows only 2% were on Education.

Right. That was our biggest deviation from their numbers. There's quite a lot of things that could account for it -- both of us are using imperfect heuristics to classify them, and they didn't exactly explain their methodology with regards to what counts as a unique question. In our case, we counted rephrasings, RTs, and quotes as retweets, not just the native ones. This may account for the difference.

We may make the data set we gathered public some time, so people can draw their own conclusions about which categorizations are more accurate.

This _is_ getting a bit offtopic, but - looking at that video I was stunned to see roundabout (No, didn't count them..) a dozen 'Good to see you. How are you?' during his entrance.

Now - I'm not trying to mock this, it's just sooo disconnected from all I know: Why do you ask questions, if you expect no answers? I see this here (moved to Israel) as well - strangers say hi and ask what's up - but don't care. At home, in Germany, I'd consider this not sincere. Yet, it seems to be quite the norm.

Words sometimes don't mean what they look like they should mean. In the US, "how are you?" or "what's up?" mean about the same thing as "nice to see you". It's not really a question, just a greeting. Confusing to learn, but a protocol that works fine once people on both ends understand it.

I've been looking forward to this since I saw the awesome insight a couple of days ago, and you guys totally delivered! I love the twitter dashboard too!

Great designer(s) you have on your team, please keep analyzing :)

Thanks! We'll be on the lookout for the next big social media event - ready to crunch the data. Appreciate the comment!

"Board" should be "Broad", if anyone who created this is reading.

I've scoured the text, but I just can't see it :( Where's the mistake?

It's in the Klout score plot.

Thanks for the tip. Good catch - it's now corrected.

This is awesome. I wish more companies would take the time to show data in meaningful ways.

This is so awesome! Love Twitsprout :D

OK, where are the answers?

Obama's answers? They were way too long to include in an infographic, but you can watch them at http://askobama.twitter.com

That's exactly right. We do have a word cloud at the bottom generated from a transcript of all of his answers, however.

No offense, but - that's not helping.

The OP probably (like me) wanted to hear the real thing. A world cloud can be fun to see how repetitive some words are used or maybe even give a limited glimpse of what the focus was for Obama here - but in general it's more a toy feature and ~useless~. Pretty, cool - but not helpful.

If a transcript is available, why isn't it posted as well?

This is a silly question. As I understand it, the info-graphic was meant to summarize results of the the event. Quit trolling.

For those asking for it, here's a full transcript: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/07/twitter-t...

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