Huffington Reviews Plouffe -- the audacity of campaigning and timidity in governing

Arianna Huffington wrote an interesting book review of David Plouffe's book on the Obama campaign. It is a nicely written critique of the actions of the Obama administration since taking office. I thought it was good enough and 'in the moment' that there would be a lot of microblogging about it. So, I decided to follow the streams.

I checked Twitter StreamGraphs to see what the communication looked like.

It looked like it had taken off.

I fiddled with the search phrase, and finally got what seemed to be the bare minimum to identify the blog which was "huffington audacity." That produced so few messages that I took another pass at it.

For a second search I used the hashtag she had recommended "Tweet your response (our Twitter hashtag is #oneyearlater), or post it in the comments section." So I also started a search for "#oneyearlater." That produced more messages.

But the messaging has been anything but impressive. After several days "huffington audacity" had found 40 tweets, and "#oneyearlater" only just over 533. The timeline for this was

The .txt file that can be read by Excel to acquire the data is: huffington-oneyearlater.txt

What happened that I did not expect? Did it not start a stream of communication? If it did it was not using Twitter so where was it? It turns out the stream went to comments. After a day there were 5200 comments on the blog post. It looks like Huffington Post is an 'insular' community. Might even call it a social network of people with similar views on politics, and they like to talk to themselves. That does not seem surprising, exactly.

This is some sort of challenge to the 'public' character of the communication. Facebook is, by default, private and it is, at least to this point, a walled silo. That pretty much rules out public communication. That means adding to data collection procedures.

November 8, 2009 I am stopping the search. Messaging about the Huffington piece never got of the line online. There was a spike on the third, and it was quickly downhill from there. There were only 4 messages on the November 8 and none on the 9th. It is time to stop.