Oh, we know, we know, it's so early in the campaign, but with State Senator and US Senate Candidate Dan Gelber's announcement today that he'll Twitter his way through the 60 day legislative session up in Tallahassee, we decided to role out a feature we've been toying with for a while. So new is it that we don't even have some sort of catchy name for it (suggestions in the comments!), but basically we'll be tracking the net roots efforts of the 2010 Senate Candidates -- which at the moment amounts to Dan Gelber and Kendrick Meek. North Miami Mayor Kevin Burns has announced too, but since his official website is still in the "coming soon" stage, we'll leave him out of this.
We'll compare the nascent net roots efforts of the candidates, hopefully tweaking it along the way until it becomes something useful and/or a fun way to poke fun of the ideas of both math and politicians trying to understand the internet. We'll compare things like twitter friends, YouTube subscribers, Technorati authority, and as things go along we'll add other dimensions (hopefully the amounts of money raised online). Maybe we'll even track the Governors race, Congressional races, or the next Mayoral election. WHO KNOWS!
Anyway, on to this very exciting data:
Twitter Friends:
Kendrick Meek: 338
Dan Gelber: 131
Technorati Blog Reactions:
KendrickMeek.us: 21
DanGelber.com: 114
Facebook Friends/Members of Largest Group:
Kendrick Meek: 2,447/2,534
Dan Gelber: 955/1038
YouTube Subscribers:
Kendrick Meek: 26
Dan Gelber: 5
And the winner, using our unscientific (basically we average out the
percentages, and weighed blog metnions twice -- since that takes effort
-- and weighted youtube by only half -- since that is dumb), not yet
fully thought through metric is: Kendrick Meek! Surprise! But
Gelber isn't that far behind, thanks to his technorati numbers, and
considering he just launched his twitter today he could give Meek a run
for his money.
The numbers we just made up give Meek a score of 68, to Gelber's 60.
Just for funsies, we decided to throw in possible Republican Candidate
Marco Rubio's stats into the mix to see how he compares. He'd get a
score of 37.