Information Week was kind enough to pick up our analysis of the Twitter Vote Report. K.C. Jones writes:
The Twitter Vote Report was subject to human judgment and technological error, according to two bloggers from Reno, Nev., who analyzed the network.
Bob Conrad, a doctoral student at the University of Nevada, and blogger Ryan Jerz found that the volunteer effort to track and publicize voting problems during the 2008 election was not truly objective, as planned.
The social media project aimed to capture field reports of voting problems through volunteers who texted and blogged to the site, but Conrad said it had “so many potential loopholes that its result should be interpreted only as a glimpse at the sharing of views of a relatively small number of voters.”
He said that Twitter Vote Report was a novel opportunity for people to share voting experiences online, but the processes for collecting and posting material contained “too many subjective interpretations of what to post to be considered reliable examples of the average voter experience.”
Read the complete story here. The analysis was also written about by Angela Gunn at BetaNews.