This article was written on January 12, 2008 by CyberNet.
Weekend Website
The upcoming presidential election this year in the United States is turning out to be very different than in years prior. One reason for this is that the Internet has become a HUGE ground for candidates to gain support and get their message out. Social sites like MySpace and Facebook are filled with all kinds of politics as are blogs and other sites. That got us wondering, if it were up to social site and other Web 2.0 users, who would be the winner right now? Well, we’ll tell ya! For today’s Weekend Website, we’re taking a look at who we’d see on the ballot come November, and ultimately, who would win the election based upon the information we found from various social sites. This data was collected on Thursday, January 10th, so be aware that it could be different at this point.
The first thing we did was to go around and find different sites that had measurable presidential data. Here’s the list we came up with and the weight we assigned each:
- YouTube Subscribers and channel views for each candidate
(20% for Subscribers, 10% for Views)
YouTube has a section dedicated to all of the candidates which can be found at www.youtube.com/youchoose. There you’ll find all of the candidates listed, and you can click on each on to be taken to their special YouTube page. On those pages they list the official number of subscribers and the channel views for each candidate. We weighted the subscribers more than the channel views, simply because in our opinion, a subscriber is more important than a view. - MySpace friends for each candidate
(20%)
There’s no doubt that MySpace is one of the top social networks out there, and it’s playing an important role for some candidates in the race. We went to MySpace to see how many friends each candidate had on their official “MySpace Profile.” - Facebook Pulse
(20%)
Facebook Pulse can be found at www.facebook.com/politics/pulse.php and it graphs the number of supporters each candidate has on Facebook. - Facebook Apps
(10%)
All but one candidate had some type of Facebook application for supporters whether it was “official” or not. We looked for the Application with the most daily active users for each candidate, and included that information in our calculation. - TechCrunch Votes
(10%)
TechCrunch has decided to hold their own political primaries online. People have been able to vote since December 18th, and it’ll run until January 18th. We checked out the results, and included those numbers. - Digg Friends
(10%)
Of course social site Digg couldn’t get away without have a page setup for the candidates. People can add the candidates as friends, and so we included the amount of friends that each has in our calculation. You can checkout Digg’s section at http://digg.com/elections.
Republicans – Ron Paul a WINNER!
Below you’ll find all of the data we input from each of the above listed sites, and the winner of the Republican “primary” listed at the top of the list under “rank”. As you’ll see, Ron Paul is designated as our Web 2.0 “winner” based upon the data we collected. CLICK TO ENLARGE
Democrats – Barack Obama a WINNER!
Below you’ll find all of the data we input from each of the above listed sites, and the winner of the Democratic “primary” listed at the top of the list under “rank”. As you’ll see, Barack Obama is designated as our Web 2.0 “winner” based upon the data we collected. CLICK TO ENLARGE
Overall Winner – Barack Obama
Based upon our calculations and the sources we used, if it were up to the users of Web 2.0 sites and social networks, Barack Obama would be the next president come November. It’s interesting, isn’t it, to take a look at the popularity some of these candidates have on the Internet? For some though, unfortunately that popularity they have on the Internet hasn’t translated to popularity elsewhere.
So there you have it, the winner of the “Web 2.0″ elections, calculated by CyberNet…
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