#leadersdebate

It was quite interesting watching the Twitterstream during the UK's 3rd debate between the 3 main parties. As always with Twitter it was a chaotic maelstrom of stuff - serious, scurrilous, funny and dull - leading Tweetdeck 's founder Ian Dodsworth to say:

90% of #leadersdebate search tweets are essentially moronic - this is pointless

My response to Ian is that we need a cr*pfilter to cull 90% of your twtstreams . But I must say it was - as always - a brilliant experience watching the realtime commentary as the event unfolded. We believe this is because it allows a broadcast media process to have a feedback element.

And of course, after the event the Spin Doctors come into the studio to try and tell us their man has won - and as usual the YouGov instant poll showed the Tory leader, David Cameron, in front (please note though that YouGov's CEO is a Tory MP candidate, but the Meedja never say that..... ) But the Twitterstream was clear - most felt the Mr Clegg (LibDem) and Gordon Brown (Labour) had edged it, typical twts being:

Also, an online poll - @youdecide2010 - "ITV Instant Poll Scores: Who had the best debate tonight?" showed (as of 1 hour after the debate) that was on Clegg 54%, Brown 39%, Cameron 11%.



Update (as of 8.30 am) - in fact, the whole polling question is becoming quite interesting after this debate, as there is quite a wide disparity among the polls. A quick summary looks like:

- The Tory press (ie Tory sympathetic papers , especially those owned by Rupert Murdoch, and Sky as well) have Cameron as a clear winner. This is being reported by the MSM media, with little analysis of where the data comes from

- Internet based "You vote" polls like the one above, on Facebook and those in the online sites of the newspapers (eg the Grauniad here) have Clegg a clear winner. These are largely being ignored by the mainstream media

- Most independent "mainstream" polls (and this interesting sentiment analysis) have it shaded between Cameron and Clegg to no great statistical benefit. These are being underplayed by much of the mainstream media - not clear why.

For the record I'm fairly apolitical on all this (I 've voted Green for 20 years fwiw), but it seems as if some sort of concerted effort is going on in the MSM to push Mr Cameron ahead - clearly in the hope that the Floating Voter gets the feeling that that is where all les autres are going. But I think they've missed the ark, I think a lot of the Floating Voters are on the Online media and are picking up different messages, or at least seeing the feedback loops o the rebuttals (see my article on this here)

The evidence - from what I can see at the moment anyway - is that the Floating Voters are more strongly Lib Dem in flavour right now, and the MSM organs are pretty much preaching to their own choirs.