Thursday, April 08, 2010

Tweeting the General Election

A message from Morus, Deputy Editor of PoliticalBetting.com

The 2010 General Election will see thousands of people attending the counting of votes at all 650 constituencies – and many of them will have Twitter accounts, and so will be able to keep us election-geeks up-to-date with the latest news.

Most people will use #GE2010, but we’d like constituency-level reports too, which means a hashtag per seat. Unfortunately, the 140-character maximum means #CumbernauldKilsythandKirkintillochEast or #InvernessNairnBadenochandStrathspey aren’t great, so the UK’s major bloggers have helped draft this standardised list.

This will also allow clever people who are building widgets to capture all the election tweets to sort them by region, or by party, or by whether they are on a target list, or other searches. Harmonised hashtags will make this much easier.

Please feel free to publish this list, or a link to THIS PoliticalBetting.com page, so that we can get as many people as possible using these hashtags. The short URL for this page is http://bit.ly/GE2010

Any advice or suggested changes, please feel free to contact morus@politicalbetting.com.

Here endeth this public service announcement.

And of course you can follow my Twitter feed HERE.

4 comments:

Gawain said...

Twittering fromk a count before the result's declared would contravene some electoral regulation - no?

Nich Starling said...

I twittered from the Norwich North Count. You can twitter things like how confident people are looking, what stage the count is at and things like turnout, recounts, etc.

Anonymous said...

It certainly introduces a new level of terror for the studio pundits on election night....

;-)

Lauchlan McLean said...

I too like gawain wondered about the legallity of using a mobile phone while the count is taking place. Each one I have taken part in in a sports hall has been heavily policed by the Returning Officer or his Deputy.