Ever wish you could plug yourself into a national election poll and see how candidates fare in the public opinion from day to day or hour to hour? Want to know what the other side is saying about your candidate?
This year you can, and without spending your entire life in front of a computer screen.
Wonkosphere, launched to cover the 2008 national election, uses patented software to track the volume, and more importantly the tone, of "buzz" in over 1,200 blogs.
Organized into pools of conservative, liberal and independent blogs, the website allows a glimpse into what each camp is writing about at the moment, and for the previous 24 hours, and whether the tone is critical or complimentary.
Friendly graphics make it easy to compare how the candidates are doing both in their own political sphere and in the others.
Wonkosphere is the latest application of a patented network text analysis technology developed at Arizona State University and licensed to Crawdad Technologies. The company is now using the program, called Listening Post (TM), to help companies keep in touch with what people are saying about them in the blogosphere.
As for Wonkosphere, it may only be a temporary event, but it does allow interested parties -- newspapers, political scholars and voters alike -- to pore through volumes of freshly-generated thought quickly and with ease.
The self-promotional buzz from Crawdad co-founder Steven Corman in a news statement: “It is a real-time scorecard for which candidate is winning the battle of the blogs.”
