Twitter Vote Report shows how people are voting in California and beyond

One great way to track the election from your computer is to use Twitter Vote Report. Twitter is a tool lots of people use to express themselves in 140 characters or less. One can "tweet" via SMS text message, via the Web or even from an instant message chat window. Then using keywords such as "#votereport" you can see what everyone tweeting about today's elections are talking about.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told L.A. Now that there are some more specific ways to use Twitter Search today to see what the masses are saying about voting in L.A.

Twitter tends to shine during shared events -- everything from earthquakes to music festivals to election day. When we see people self-organizing and helping each other out we're reminded how important it is to provide simple, reliable tools. Twitter Vote Report is a great example of the timely and creative projects that can be built by third party developers using Twitter's APIs.

The best way to see what people are saying about the election is to visit Election.twitter.com. We built this site using Twitter's search and filtering technology. In fact, you should dig into search more. If you want to get local, you can do a slightly more advanced search at Search.twitter.com. For example, do this query to find out what people in L.A. are saying about the candidates:

Obama OR McCain OR Palin OR Biden near: "Los Angeles"

Here's a link to the query:  http://tinyurl.com/5g78s3

Once you get hooked on Twitter you will see that the L.A. Times has several Twitter feeds that come in handy on days such as today. To follow the insight of the Top of the Ticket blog click here, for breaking news click here, or if you are already sick of politics and want to follow our Sports news, click here.

-- Tony Pierce

Comments

[Bob Conrad]

Tony, I ran an analysis of the Twitter Vote Report and come up with interesting results. They may be found here:

http://thegoodthebadthespin.com/2008/11/09/a-post-election-analysis-of-the-twitter-vote-report/