This week many educators enjoyed the shared experience of watching the debate with a Twitter overlay. Most did it the old fashioned way, with the TV on and a laptop handy. No laptop? No problem. If you receive the Current channel, then you could watch Hack the Debate , which featured the debate with Tweets from the general public floating across the screen. As much as I enjoy snark from the Twitterverse, I prefer to know personally the people who are sniping at the candidates. So I switched over to CNN which featured their Dial Test technology, enabling viewers to see how a randomly selected group of 16 male and 16 female registered voters from Ohio feel about what each candidate is saying, in real time. I have to admit that I did find that fascinating.

I do wonder what a technology like that costs. Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds? Honestly, I have no idea. However, I did find it interesting. Unfortunately, the sample size is far too small to get any sort of accurate barometer. Wouldn’t it be interesting to be able to replicate the same experiment for free, with a much larger sample size?

Well, that’s just what Andy Carvin did earlier this week. While watching Twitter, I kept seeing people throw in the hash tag #dialtest along with a name, grade and comment. Things like this “#dialtest *Obama 7.0* Like what he said re: bailout”. I did a few Google searches and came across this post of Andy’s on the NPR blog.

Basically he thought to himself, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could create our own Dial Test using free and accessible tools?” And lo and behold, he did. Take one tablespoon Plodt, mix it up with half a cup of Twitter, and then mix thoroughly, adding basic programming logic as needed. People were able to send out Tweets in a very specific format, Plodt would pick them up, and aggregate them all together on one graph. End result?

Christine
10/11/2008