A handy Tweet tracker has been monitoring and analyzing social media activity pertaining to the election since campaigning began, compiling the results into a series of digestible chunks. Some of its findings are surprising, like just how much Social Democrat and all-round web savant, Ken Curtin, tweets. Spoiler: a lot.
Other findings are not quite so surprising, such as the fact that Gerry Adams is still the biggest draw for RTs on the Irish political landscape, with his 266 tweets – at time of writing – having been retweeted 6144 times. This gives him a fairly staggering retweet ratio of 23.10 per post. To place this in context, the second placed on the list was Aodhán Ó Ríordáin with 3.69.
With a mixture of blog posts and more detailed entries with graphs, and comprehensive breakdowns that are understandable even to the most remedial database dunce. Run by data analyst Barry James from East Meath, the site is a worthy metric for the political pulse of the nation and perhaps points to the way all elections will be run in future; a sane and respectful dialogue on the issues, as presented in 140 character bursts from people’s phones. Or at the very least, a series of lists featuring those political figures best at writing inscrutable nonsense, with references to rubber ducks.
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