If Internet users held a particular position about a candidate, Stanford University’s Management Science & Engineering department probably caught their opinions in a bubble.

Through the use of real-time data firm Wise Window’s software as a service for qualitative data, Stanford constructed a tracking tool for the 2008 Presidential election.

As the Democratic primary continues to grind across the country (we get our shot at voting next Tuesday), more news items emerge about its two candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as the Republican candidate,John McCain.

Stanford built its tracker to express the opinions surrounding candidates in a visually-friendly way. One may visit the Bubble Tracker and see how positive or negative recent commentary appeared about the candidate.

Green bubbles mean good comments, while purple ones reflect bad ones. Visitors to the Stanford site make click on one of the bubbles to see a link to the story driving that opinion.

Viewing past opinions and the bubbles they made may be done through the use of a slider control below the bubble window. Each change with the slider alters the bubbles for each candidate.

And when you pass the mouse pointer over the candidate’s window, the bubbles begin to circulate. So cool! Links we observed hit news stories appearing on Topix and Diggin our unscientific look at Stanford’s bubbles.

Posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 11:48 am. Permalink