In my research on politicians’  use of Twitter, I came across these widgets showing live updates of MPs tweeting throughout the day. To me these are a quick way (although not always reliable) to collect the usernames of tweeting politician.

Here are some links to pages aggregating political tweets:
Tweetcongress is a basic page showing who in the US congress is tweeting, how often and what about.

Kamertweets is a Dutch version also showing basic data. It let’s you embed the latest tweets on your own webpage:

Then there is of course the British Tweetminster. This seems to be, of these three, the most elaborate one. Not only does Tweetminster provide the basic data. It allows you to use html-code to embed tweets onto your page, as you can see below:

Not only that, they also provide html-code to embed the Tweetometer (a spin-off of the famous Swingometer in the UK):

This is all nice, and although these widgets were not intended for analysis purposes, it would be very nice to see some more elaborate analysis of the role Twitter plays in political communication. Here at Yeungnam University’s WCU Webometrics Institute, we are developing a number of tools that allows us to collect and visualize data (yes yes shameless self promotion). Analysis takes place with regular software tools (SPSS, Pajek, Ucinet). Papers are coming available soon at a conference near you.

2009 and 2010 are exciting years to study the Internet. Anyway, I think so. Some of you may know my academic life revolves around micro-blogging these last months and the coming ones as well. The reason is that Twitter is becoming more and more popular amongst politicians. Not only that, in 2009 we had the European parliament elections where Twitter was used by some of the candidates. In 2010 we had the local elections in the Netherlands. Some two weeks before that we (i.e. the Dutch) had a governmental meltdown: the social democratic party (PvdA) decided to quit the government. Therefore, we also have general elections on June 9th. And then there is South Korea, where on June 2nd, there are local elections. Oh yes, the UK has general elections as well: Gordon Brown has to set a date that is before June 3rd.

As for South Korea, some interesting thongs are happening here. Apparently the political parties are stepping up their online campaign activities, according this newspaper article.The Grand National Party handed out smart-phones to national assembly members and candidates, hoping they will pick up text-messaging and Twitter to connect to the public. The Democratic Party also stepped up their online activities, creating a network party. These effort can be necessary. I learned that politicians in South Korea have a considerable

The Korean Election Committee however seems to have some problems with these increasing online political activities. To ensure fairness in election campaigning several regulations apply. Striving for fairness in campaigning is of course essential. At the same it seems quite impossible to banish Twitter or other kinds of micro-blogging services (let’s not forget there are other ones besides Twitter, such as Me2day, Plurk and Renren). First of all, micro-blogging is sort of an informal way of disseminating information. It’s low profile, no dressed up website, but merely short texts. At the same time the messages are only actively targeted to those that explicitly subscribed to the Tweets of the candidate. These are the ones that are already interested in politics in general and the candidate in particular. These probably will need little convincing to vote for the candidate as it is. Furthermore, the question is to what extent the Tweets are actually campaigning messages or merely chitchat. Tweeting about daily issues (enjoying your coffee, being stuck in traffic) doesn’t look like political campaigning. That is, political campaigning in the strictest sense. For some time now, politicians, at least in western countries increasingly personalize their campaigns, presenting themselves as mortals having the same problems other people also have. By doing so they hope, is their guess, they appear as normal people made of flesh and blood and hopefully more likable. This in turn should ultimately lead to more votes in the elections. The jury’s verdict on that is still out.

Just recently, David Nieborg (University of Amsterdam), guest in the radio show Tros Radio Online, said that the new social-democratic party leader Job Cohen (the former leader Wouter Bos resigned two weeks after the local elections and 12 weeks prior to the general elections)  should start using Twitter. He predicted this could lead to four more seats in parliament. Well, I’m not that sure. Twitter is not online a micro-blogging service, but also a social-network site. A characteristic of a social network is homophily: people that are similar tend to form a social network. So what happens is that politicians using twitter are primarily preaching to the converted instead of the disbelievers. However, the disbelievers is where the electoral gain is to be expected. So, the effectiveness of Twitter and other social network sites as campaigning tools for more electoral gain is expected to be limited. However, the final verdict is to be passed by empirical research.

South Koreans value security highly. We all do, and I’m not sure they do so more than in other countries. However, some things struck my eye. For instance, there is an abundance of CCTV camera’s. In parking lots, subway, stores, PC Bangs, apartment blocks and in the streets. They are way ahead of us. Whether that’s a good thing I’m not so sure. Apparently this is being accepted. Korea being a Confucian country, one could ask whether Koreans score high on authoritarianism. In contrast, Great Brittan has many CCTV cameras as well but I suspect they don’t care much for authority, especially since the recent troubles about excessive reimbursements. So, I suspect that there maybe only a small correlation between the acceptance of CCTV and authoritarianism. At the same time, I’ve seen surprisingly little police in the streets, so far. Maybe they are all sitting indoors watching the TV’s.

Home security becomes digital as well. My front door lock comes with a pin code. No I’m not going to tell what it is. To ensure I don’t forget it, I changed it to the same one my mobile phone has. I suspect many of us do this, because with all electronic bank cards and passwords it’s becoming more secure but also  more difficult to remember them all. You’d have to be quite computer savvy to use a password manager and organize all your security info.

Another example of security I encountered was at Starbucks. Yes, as a foreigner you tend to visit Starbucks for the Wifi connection, and so far I counted three locations in Daegu. Anyhow, I opened my laptop and searched for the network. I found the network. But there it stopped. To connect to the Internet I had to provide my foreigner ID number and name. OK, so security is tight, that’s for sure. But apparently, this not only applies to foreigners: Koreans wanting to register at Cyworld have to produce an official ID as well. This means all Internet activity can be traced back to the person. This may be a downside. However, the upside is that communication on Cyworld most likely conforms more to regular social norms and activity and is less controversial.

Internet security is also serious business for the Koreans. According to The Korea Times of September 9^th 2009, the Korean Communications Commission (KCC) and the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA) plan to have ISPs to monitor customer’s Internet security (e.g. malicious software, bad virus protection). If customers do not comply to minimum rules of computer safety, ISP are compelled to limit or even cut off computers from the Internet. Compare it to compulsory inoculation for the swine flu at the risk of being confined to home for long. Software companies that fail to fix their software vulnerabilities at the risk of their business being suspended. The reason for tightening security is a number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks last July, affecting more than 80,000 computers. And then on September 13th the Korea Times reported that also 3000 cyber sherrifs are to cruise the web for suspicious activities. This all shows that the Korean government takes its responsibility, not only by promoting the online activities but also securing it.

Below are some pictures on health, safety and security in South Korea: