Progress so far....

 Click to enlarge.

In response to public demand he's a chart of the volume of tweets each candidate has got over the last week I've been getting data. I also be doing the positive and negative sentiment figures at some point as well.

Obviously the Lib Dems wouldn't admit it but they can't be happy being bottom for 5 of the last 7 days. Given that one of the other day's was Paddick's manifesto launch  Neither will the Greens be happy to be beneth Benita every day. Then comes the key question both for this experiment and the election how much do tweets translate into votes or at least registering on proper opinion polls with correctly weighted samples?

There does appear to be something of a pattern emerging with the top 2 somewhat correllated and the bottom 3 similarly bound together. We'll see if that continues next week.

My methodology does favour the smaller parties so I suspect Ken and Boris are quite a bit further ahead in reality but I get twitter handles and full names rather than first names so this shrinks the gap between the politicians on first name terms with the electorate as oppossed to those who aren't even famous in their own household. This is for two reasons 1) capacity the API I use searches for a max of 1500 tweets per search term if I search for Ken instead of Ken Livingstone then I would be much more likely to reach full capacity and miss tweets. 2) There are quite a few other Ken and Boris's in the world so if it's full names I'm searching for at least I know I'm getting the right ones.

The other two candidates didn't feature on the graph as it was hard enough doing it with data where they weren't any gaps.

R\ggplot2\data stuff

This was something of a pig to do but a good learning excercise nontheless. Things to note for the future. The date has to be the correct date format. Whatever you do don't spend hours faffing about making things into factors or as.integers or as.characters or any of that gubbins. You want as.Date.

Need to work out how to select the colours.

Data need to be in the sort of format you see below

Candidate	Date	Volume
Boris	08/04/12	489
Ken	08/04/12	569
Siobhan	08/04/12	333
Jenny	08/04/12	303
Brian	08/04/12	164
Boris	09/04/12	1541
Ken	09/04/12	839
Siobhan	09/04/12	271
Jenny	09/04/12	183