
My response to YC RFS 3 - cjoh
http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/listening-twitter/
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jacoblyles
The author hits the drawbacks pretty well. Politicians only care about broad
opinion polls because those tell them how to market themselves to actually win
elections. Letters and emails, and tweets!, written to representatives suffer
from too much selection bias for them to care.

However, this will be a great placebo for the masses of people that like to
feel involved. So it could draw a lot of traffic anyway, which could mean
money. I can see his site being something that Wolf Blitzer checks constantly
the day before the election. Like CNN's moving maps, this can become part of
the grand spectacle of Democracy that we have all grown to know and love.

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HistoryInAction
Interesting... the application of twitter and gMaps mashups to politics is
something I'm keeping a close eye on for my future races. I especially liked
this map that the Corzine people rolled out in NJ:
[http://www.joncorzine09.com/main.cfm?actionId=globalShowStat...](http://www.joncorzine09.com/main.cfm?actionId=globalShowStaticContent&screenKey=cmpMap&s=corzine)

The follow-up thought that a friend of a friend who started to run for a
delegate seat in MD was to design a system where someone could put in a small
~30 sec video clip of why you were supporting a candidate. You could use these
map-clip mashups to generate neighborhood meetings, organize precinct
meetings, and probably lots more.

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ptrcksmth
If you're in the U.S., checkout 2gov.org - tweet @2gov with your view on
current issues and they'll automatically notify all of your elected
representatives.

They also provide some pretty cool rollup stats on what folks are tweeting to
them.

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far33d
Really this is something of a response to #1 and #3. Imagine that instead of
congress listening, journalists/bloggers/etc used it as a way of doing their
own impromptu polls of sentiment on issues by district.

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jlees
These are separate use cases for the same technology (and same product).

Governmental listening. Media analysis. PR and spin doctor campaign
monitoring. Local election candidate passive polling. Local agency (e.g.
Scottish NHS) polling. The list is pretty endless.

The problem is that so, so many of these people just don't have big budgets.
Good sentiment analysis is hard. Tracking and quantifying opinion across
platforms (not just Twitter), in real-time, to an appropriate degree of
accuracy doesn't come _that_ cheap - even with web-twenty cloud-malarkey
stuff.

We've found other (potential!) sources of funding beyond the government and
agencies themselves, 'cos they just don't have flash cash, and with their
spending under scrutiny in the UK... yeah, we basically had to.

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jlees
_Taking it further, you could build a vocabulary of issues[...] extract them
from Twitter, along with their geo-locations, and do a sentiment-analysis on
them [...]_

OK, so hi. That's my startup. :)

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aditya
You're making the assumption that Congress actually values listening :-)

I think government transparency is great as an ideal, but what seem to be
happening so far is that there's a lot of lip service being paid to show that
things are changing, and I realize that it is early days, but Congress
"listens" to "polilng" because that is the only way they can stay in power,
all other forms of listening have much lower value to them.

Not that it isn't an interesting idea.

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hernan7
BTW, how do you ever get to that rfs3.html page?

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gsiener
Here's the main page: <http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html>

~~~
nl
Is that actually linked from anywhere on ycombinator? It isn't exactly
obvious.

