Taegan Goddard's Political Wire

November 16, 2009

A Fresh Look at the Political Twitterati

In just a few short months, Twitter has become a necessary tool for anyone interested in politics and government. But unless you find the right people to follow, it can be hard to make the most of it.

For all you Twitter geeks, Twiangulate, a new Twitter analysis tool, debuts this morning. It's definitely worth checking out.

Here are some of the more interesting discoveries I've made:

• Sen. John McCain is the only tweeter followed by all three network Sunday show hosts: George Stephanopoulos, David Gregory and Bob Schieffer.
• Michelle Malkin and Markos Moulitsas -- polar opposites when it comes to politics -- each follow hundreds of Twitterers but have only a dozen in common, including Political Wire.
• Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper and I follow 18 of the same people, including political analyst Jennifer Duffy who is relatively new to Twitter.

Did I mention this is a tool for geeks?

Twiangulate is a skunkworks project at BlogAds, which sells ads on some of the biggest political blogs on the web. Blogads founder Henry Copeland tells us the site grew out of his "desire to figure out who people follow on Twitter without browsing long, long jumbled lists of followers. I looked around for a tool, but couldn't find one. So we put some spare hours over the last six months into programming the service. When we saw that a few other people liked the idea, we decided to spruce up the design and add some features."

Twiangulate has been under private beta for a month -- @pwire was one of the first users -- and they just opened their doors to everyone today.

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Taegan D. Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country, including the Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Christian Science Monitor.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

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-- Dotty Lynch, CBS News political consultant

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-- Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post

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-- Dick Morris, political consultant

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-- Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.

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