Super Tuesday

Forget A. Cooper and forget W. Blitzer, I've turned to a new medium and new personalities to watch the presidential primary results (republican and democrat) come through tonight. A service called Twittervision has developed a "mashup" of primary-related twittergrams and GoogleMaps. Click here to access the mashup.

Basically, Twitter users (sometimes referred to as "Tweeties") can instant message, phone text, or enter from the web a message (a "twittergram") to Twitter, who relays the information to everyone signed up to follow the Twitter user. For example, lets say I'm a Twitter user and Lisa tracks what I'm doing via Twitter. I could text from my phone a short message to Twitter (something like "I just got done with a run with Maya"), and Lisa and whomever else is following me would get the message. I could even send a link to a picture or a video. Pretty simple. I know, who wants to know what someone is doing all of the time...why would we want to know you just ran with your dog?

Twitter and Twittervision become relevant when a whole bunch of twittergrams on a certain topic are aggregated onto one stage. Like tonight with the primary election results trickling in. Its like having an "international conversation" about this one topic -- some comments are interesting, others are crazy. Overlaying all this information over a GoogleMap of the US makes it much easier to watch and interpret. I feel like I can get a better pulse of how things are shaping up and what people are looking for in a candidate than I can watching the CNN, MSNBC, NPR, etc. Some people are posting photos of their caucus or primary locations. People from across the US are posting, with several international twittergrams showing up as well. These people represent a new version of old CNN correspondents.

Not much for national election info? I wondered out loud with Lisa how valuable something like this would be on the local level, to hold "town meetings" without having to actually meet in person? I think it would be to hear my neighbors' thoughts on the proposed redevelopment of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center complex. It too could be overlayed on GoogleMaps, so when someone living at the intersection of 6th and Colorado makes a crazy comment about how bad the traffic will be (I went to a community meeting on the topic, and most comments were absolutely crazy), the person sitting in their living room on 2nd and Cherry (probably very quiet compared to 6th and Colorado) have a little perspective to understand the other person's comments.

Would this work to learn about information at your kids' schools? There was a stabbing at a high school in Longmont, CO last week. While school administrators were able to appropriately address the situation, parent notification tools (an automatic phone system to call all parents and an email system to email parents in case of an emergency) did not work as planned. I bet half of the students at the school text messaged one another , with several probably twittering about the incident. What if parents were hooked into this stream of information? Or information on parent/teacher conferences, or information on athletic programs, or school cancellations?

I think we're going to see a lot more from this information medium in the next few years!