Iran student rally

So, it was not [yet] breaking news. The Washington Post used the forthcoming rally and the steps being taken by the Iranian government as a starting point for discussing the divisions within the Iranian political class. BBC, on the other hand, focussed on the impact of the steps being taken by the government on communication -- press and citizen. AlJazeera also honed in on the attempt to closed down communication in case there would be a rally. This is The Washington Post version of the results the day after.

Looking for a search phrase I checked TweetVolume.

This proved slightly misleading with respect to Archivist searches. "Iran rally monday" only found 35 messages, which was less than the other two. Because Monday is exceedingly likely to go away I decided to use both "iran student rally" and "iran rally." Iran rally had a bit more planning for the rally than I found with "iran student rally".

I began the searches at 11:00 a.m. December 6 -- the day before the rally. "iran rally" found 387 messages. "iran student rally" located 191 messages.

It is now the day after the rally -- December 8, 2009 -- and my search was not adequate to the task. When I looked at the results for #iran and #iranelection, which are the two standbys of protest, I found many messages about the rally that did not use the words for which I searched. Neither was only about the rally -- even on the day of the rally. But there were 1500 messages in each search for that day, and I decided to keep them and see if I want to sort this all out later.

09/12/08