I’ve very quickly created a Yahoo! Pipes mashup for today’s council and London mayor elections in the UK. All it does at the moment is
- take the RSS feed for Tweetscan searches for ‘election’, ‘voted’, ‘voting’, ‘vote’, ‘Ken Livingstone‘ and ‘Boris Johnson‘,
- gets rid of duplicate results,
- and spits out a feed.
- UPDATE: Now it also takes feeds from Google News and Technorati searches for local election and the two london candidates
- It also filters out anything with ‘Zimbabwe’ in it, as reports on those elections were coming through.
I’d like to invite you to clone the mashup and make improvements. Or you can just suggest them here.
Some things I’d like to do are: add images; geo information and mapping; other feeds; filtering based on user input (e.g. location).
Meanwhile, here’s how the two mayoral candidates are faring on Twitter mentions according to a search on Twist:
Online Journalism Blog 
Good stuff Paul.
It is good to see the digital newsroom being used to increase the awareness of local politics
i like the switching of colours between the two candidates, easily done in this day and age ;-). Good work, really useful stuff, will use this in a web journalism class tomorrow
Here’s a totally accurate and sure to predict the result of the election Pipe: Counts the number of Twitts mentioning ‘Boris’ and ‘Vote’ vs the number mentioning ‘Ken’ and ‘vote’
Currently running 35 to Ken, 28 to Boris.
There may possibly be a teeny tiny margin for error. I noticed one lady saying “Do not vote for Boris” which will unfortunately be recorded as a vote for, er, Boris.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=nmZxt20X3RGTJYmNMlrX_Q
Tried to make a clone with a Cheshire filter but have no idea if I succeeded or not!
Location data for tweetscan feeds.
http://tinyurl.com/647ah4
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