Obama announces $5 billion for healthcare jobs

September 30, 2009 the Obama administration announced that it would put $5 billion into healthcare jobs. The first message in response to the announcement was at 9:30 that morning. When I searched a small number of messages were found that had been sent earlier than that.

This is not exactly a 'big story.' By midnight there were only 242 tweets. It seems a good candidate for 'under the radar.'

The search term used was "Obama healthcare jobs"

The first message found was November 14, 2009. The search was closed April 3, 2010.

This search produced peculiar results. Obama announced that there would be many new jobs in health care when health care reform was put into place. Very few paid attention to that announcement. What the search began to produce rather quickly was the complaint that Obama was giving too much attention to health care reform and not enough to jobs. So it is very mixed -- with only 2508 messages found.

The mix probably accounts for the distribution in time.

The data files are obama healthcare jobs.xml and obama healthcare jobs.txt, which is a tab delimited file that can be read with Excel.

© G. R. Boynton, 2010
April 3, 2010