Tweetminster Search measures the pulse of UK politics in real time – it shows you how people feel about the issues of the day – as expressed through the thousands of messages posted to Twitter by politicians, news source, journalists and the public – and cuts through the noise to help you find relevant content. Because our search works in real time it shows what the people think now and tracks how their opinions and news stories have changed over time.

It’s easy to use. Enter a search term (eg. Iraq Inquiry) or up to three multiple terms (eg. Labour, Tories, Lib Dems) and click ‘Search’ – the results show you:

• The number of relevant posts about the subject over time: our system dynamically creates a sample from thousands of people that is weighted, and is quantitatively and qualitatively representative of Twitter as a whole.

• How these posts break down into positive, negative and neutral opinions (sentiment) – the sentiment score is a quantitative measurement, on a scale of 1 to 5, based on average sentiment determined by our algorithms within content from the analysed sample.

• Plus lots of related information – associated terms and issues, links to most shared URLs, the individuals with the most impact on the subject (influencers) and a location breakdown for where the terms have been discussed the most.

• And relevant content and trends.

The premise of our methodology is a network analysis of politicians, media, influencers and “members of the public” that are on Twitter and post about politics – this network is in the high thousands, and is constantly growing.
When someone does a search on Tweetminster we create a sample from our network that is dynamically weighted and representative of overall volume and population of tweets for that search over a period of time (i.e. each day the size of the sample will also vary depending on how popular that term has been on different days).
This means that in terms of tweets from MPs, PPCs, journalists, news sources and members of the public, the sample will be relfective of volume, affiliation (when applicable) and conversations/tweets across the network.
In doing so, we look at tweets that have greater reach, influence (their position is “echoed” by many), and only count orignal tweets and not the retweets it generated. Our algorithms then determine sentiment by looking at positive, neutral and negative linguistic meaning within tweets. The sentiment score is a quantitative measurement, on a scale of 1 to 5, based on average sentiment within content from the analysed sample. A score of O occurs when positive and negative balance each other out, or all content is neutral.
It’s worth noting that volume and reach are equally important – for example if an event has greater reach and resonance amongst one party over another this will be reflected in the sample, and consequently in the results.
All the above happens in near real-time.

On Sunday tweetminster team published an update of their experiment in predictive modelling to study the correlation between word-of mouth and election results. Here are the trends in detail.

Tweetminster feeds, data and expertise are powering apps and partnership with

Press Association-General election Map Tool (open data at work?) . The map features a live stream of political tweets, live measurement of the number of tweets (all time per party and most active in the last hour) and sentiment ratings of how positively / negatively the Twitter community is feeling about the parties and their leaders.

MyPoliticsUk iPhone App - PurpleForge. Purple Forge worked closely with Tweetminster to define the data sources, feeds, Twitter IDs and news sources that drive the UK political scene for MyPolitics UK, and engaged our friends at Thin Martian to design the branding and give the user interface a distinct British flavour.

The Indipendent Newspaper- The Livewire. The Livewire is a fully functioning Twitter client with filtered feed that let Indy readers view the tweets from MPs, PPCs, news sources, government departments, journalists and the people who make up the most active members of the Twitter politics network – a dynamic group identified by Tweetminster’s tracking tools. In addition to the Livewire, Tweetminster regularly supplies data and analysis pieces to the Independent politics team to add insight into how politicians are using Twitter and how the public are reacting to news stories and spin

Tweetminster is not associated with Twitter. Twitter is a registered trademark of Twitter Inc.