election

Needless to say, there's a lot of emotions and expressed on Twitter every day, but it feels virtually impossible to navigate through all of them to extract a general consensus on most topics.

However, computing giant SGI thinks it may have found a way to pinpoint just that.

SGI has teamed up with researchers from the University of Illinois to analyze the entire Twitter feed for sentiments and volume in real-time using SGI's UV 2000 Big Brain data-mining computer.

By combining geotagged tweets with a Twitter-focused sentiment engine, SGI said researchers have been able create a sophisticated streaming … Read more

In social media, as in politics, four years is an eternity.

That's an example of a tweetable thought -- pithy and likely to be shared -- that you find sprinkled throughout social media these days.

The mild pressure to come up with re-tweetable posts is just one of the ways things have changed for me social-media-wise since the 2008 election, the first U.S. presidential election where social media was part of the equation.

Here are eight developments worth noting:

1. Facebook: 2008 was, indeed, a long time ago. At the end of that August, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his service had crossed 100 million users, … Read more

In certain corners of America, there is a mood of relief and joy. In others, rampant despair.

This partly stems from the rather limited number of candidates at the voters' disposal.

Unless, that is, you choose your own. In that searing home of live-and-let-live that is Georgia, almost 4,000 people knew exactly who was the right man to lead its state into the future.… Read more

Some major technology-related political hot potatoes have been tossed around this past year. The Stop Online Piracy Act may have gotten the most attention.

CNET broke down the presidential candidates' stances on a variety of tech issues before the election. For example, when it came to SOPA, Romney spoke out against it, while Obama danced a little more delicately around the issue.

The election will be shaping the direction of tech-related legislation for several years to come. It has already had an impact by weeding out three SOPA-sponsoring congressmen.

As an informed geek voter, how much did tech issues sway … Read more

Besides President Obama, the big winner on Election Day was big data.

Big data's patron saint -- FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver -- won the battle to predict the outcome of the contest between Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Where breathless pundits brandishing equivocating polls shouted from the rooftops over the last few weeks that the race for the White House was a "toss-up," or "too close to call," Silver and other poll aggregators sat back and calmly told anyone who would listen that the math told another story: Obama's re-election was never … Read more

It's well known that before any big game, the T-shirts and hats that laud a victory are prepared by both sides.

Yet a curious thing happened after Barack Obama was re-elected on Tuesday night: Mitt Romney's victory Web site went live.

Perhaps it was someone's idea of humor -- or even anger. Yet it was immediately spotted by Political Wire, which cheerily took screenshots for public edification.

Those who enjoy schadenfreude will offer their snorts and smirks. For them, this is a Rom-Com.

Yet we seek deeper significances here.

What was odd about this election was that … Read more

You might have spent election night rooting for Obama or Romney.

I occasionally squinted at the spectacle -- mesmerized at times by Karl Rove, his Mac and his pain -- but, at heart, I waited for news of Santiaga.

No, she is not a Hispanic singer who was bravely standing in Arizona. She is Colleen Lachowicz, the brave World of Warcraft enthusiast who was standing for the state Senate in Maine.

You might remember that I had enjoyed an earlier commitment to Santiaga.

The Maine GOP decided that her moonlighting as an Orc Assassination Rogue made her unfit for office. … Read more

Instagram users showed off their voting activities on Election Day, uploading more than 250,000 election-related photos and immediately posting a slew of photos after hearing of the president's victory, the photo-sharing network posted today.

In the U.S., users tagged more than 100,000 photos with #IVoted and 150,000 photos with #election2012, Instagram reported, with the largest surge of photos coming in right after news outlets projected President Barack Obama's win. At that moment, the number of Instagram photos uploaded each second was at 2.1 times the normal rate.

Clearly, these Americans are not shy … Read more

While there's no telling how much impact Facebook had on U.S voters, the social network says its users talked a lot, creating more election buzz than ever.

There were 71.7 million election-related mentions in posts and comments in the U.S. yesterday, and 88.7 million globally, Facebook said today.

The company's data team used its "Talk Meter" to measure the chatter -- posts and comments -- around the election and, ranking them on a scale of 1 to 10, Facebook said. Election 2012 buzz came in at a 9.27. That compares to … Read more