As the author of the New York Times’ bestselling Hamlet’s Blackberry, William Powers taught us how to build a good life in the digital age. And now Powers himself is doing just that. At Crowdwire, a Bluefin Labs funded project, Powers is using the tens of millions of Twitter and public Facebook comments to analyze the Presidential election. And as he told me over Skype, Crowdwire is providing analytical depth about voter sentiment that “nobody else has offered before.” At Crowdwire, Powers really is going deeper with digital and, in particular, offering us remarkable insight into how women, minorities and other groups are perceiving the two candidates.
As I told Powers, I’m absolutely convinced that Obama will win in November. But the more cautious Powers isn’t convinced. “Anything can happen” between now and the election, he told me. But whatever does, indeed, happen – one thing you can be sure about is that Crowdwire will provide us with deep digital insight into it.