Frequently Asked Questions

Q. How does the 2008 Presidential Wire work?

A. The 2008 Presidential Wire collects stories mentioning possible 2008 Presidential candidates from publicly available RSS feeds, stuffs them in a database, analyzes them, and presents them to the reader in near real time. It's the first news aggregator and buzz tracking tool for the 2008 Presidential campaign.

Q. How do you select which stories get included?

A. The Wire is 100% auto-generated. Any story mentioning a candidate, if it's in our mainstream media (MSM) or blog feeds, gets included. The Wire is meant to be a broad and comprehensive measure of the conversation and buzz surrounding a potential candidate.

Q. What are "Hot Stories?"

A. "Hot Stories" are the five stories in the last 24 hours with the most clickthroughs from readers.

Q. How come my favorite candidate isn't on here?

A. All of those mentioned prominently in the media as potential candidates as of May 2005 were included in the Wire's launch, but there's always a chance someone was missed. E-mail any suggested additions wire@patrickruffini.com.

Q. I see that the Wire often tracks 200 to 300 stories a day. How can I keep up with all of them?

A. There's a flip side to being comprehensive -- sometimes, there's so much information it's hard to know where to start. As part of a future upgrade, I'm exploring ways of presenting the most relevant stories more prominently.

The "Filter Stories" and Search options are the solution for finding stories that are more than a few hours old. Use them to read stories about the candidates that interest you, see the latest by source or by party, or search the headlines.

Q. I just saw a headline that's clearly spam, or contains inappropriate content. How do I report it?

A. Send a note to wire@patrickruffini.com with the precise headline in the headline. One of the disadvantages of a fully automated system is that blog spam in RSS source feeds occasionally gets through. An ever-expanding array of filters are in place to block offensive content and consistently low-quality news sources.

Q. What do the Statistics measure? What do those up or down arrows mean?

A. The statistics section measures the number of stories about a potential candidate, in the last 24 hours, or the last 30 days. The arrows measure the relative change in coverage from the last day to the day before. This is similar to Today's Top Movers on Yahoo! Buzz.

Q. Are these numbers a measure of who's up and coming, and who's down and out?

A. Quite possibly… and not necessarily.

The statistics are pretty good at capturing how often a particular name pops up in the news, and may be a better measure than the polls of who's building recognition at this early stage in the game. But they don't measure if the coverage is positive or negative (namely, whether a potential candidate is translating publicity into favorability) –- a perusal of the headlines can give you a better sense of that.

A statistic I'd love to compile when there's enough data are the clickthrough rates on stories broken down by candidate. This would be a more accurate measure of how much public appetite there is for information about a particular person.

Q. Is there any way to get stories from my blog included in the Wire?

A. At the moment, not directly. The Wire takes a Feedster RSS feed for the blog stories, so the best way to ensure your blog is represented is to ping Feedster when posting to your blog. You can add your blog's RSS feed to Feedster right here.

Q. How can you have a headline about Hillary Clinton that's labeled as Rudy Giuliani?

A. Stories are included in the Wire based on the text in the story. When more than one candidate's name appears in a story, the database will randomly assign a candidate to that story, so it is possible to have a story primarily about one candidate be assigned to another.