Obama declares Swine Flu a national emergency

It was not breaking news, but it took off. The president declared the emergency -- though some more information about this is necessary which will surely be available from The Washington Post tomorrow.

This is the figure giving the takeoff.

This is a Trendistic figure based on the phrase "swine flu." It shows the timing of the jump. It does not include Obama because Trendistic searches for exact phrases and the exact phrases in this case are not as good as this. The real point is to identify the initial phase of the tweeting; it was taking off between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. on October 24.

The next figure shows that there was a steady flow of messages about swine flu before the president declared the emergency.

And it shows the jump after the president's declaration. If I had show a view of a month it would have been the same story -- a steady stream before the 24th and then a major spike.

For the search with Archivist I wanted to get Obama into the phrasing to exclude whatever stream of messages were being communicated independent of his declaration. So the search phrase was "Obama swine flu". Fortunately, Archivist searches for the presence of the words rather than an exact phrase.

The search stopped in the evening of November 22, 2009 with a tweet count of 11, 689. The timeline for the entire period was

It was down to only a few per day by the end.

One characteristic of the tweets to note is the number that claimed that Obama had 'invented' the scare for political purposes. Apparently, nothing is beyond suspicion for the partisans of the 'other side.'

The .txt file that can be read by Excel to acquire the data is: obama swine flu.txt