The final paper in our panel at AoIR 2013 is by Anders Larsson and Bente Kalsnes, looking at the Norwegian election on 9 Sep. Their work examines the use of Twitter by citizens, politicians, and journalists. One starting point for this were the #valg2013 and #valg13 hashtags, to identify what users are being mentioned in these hashtags - which showed that then-PM Jens Stoltenberg was @mentioned frequently but did not often reply, while the Greens party both sent and received many hashtagged tweets. Amongst the retweeters, one-off messages which receive substantial retweets can become prominent, but more frequently retweeted users …

The next paper in our AoIR 2013 panel is by Julia Neubarth and Christian Nuernbergk, covering the German federal election two days after the Australian one. The Net is playing an increasingly important role in political communication in Germany, but there is still very little active participation by citizens, and active participants are mainly male, younger, and left-wing. Politicians are getting more active - some 60% of federal parliamentarians are on Twitter, although Chancellor Merkel still isn't.

German politicians on Twitter will find a mixed audience - use in the country is growing, but still limited; however, active participants are …

The next paper in our AoIR 2013 panel is by Theresa Sauter, Tim Highfield and me. Here are the slides - audio to come later now with audio...

#ausvotes Mark Two: Twitter in the 2013 Australian Federal Election from Axel Bruns

The next panel at AoIR 2013 is one which I'm presenting in as well - we've brought together a number of presentations on the use of Twitter in national elections. The first presenter is Luca Rossi, whose focus is on the 2013 Italian election. He and his colleagues have examined activity on Twitter and Facebook during the month before the February election, gathering some 2 million @mentions and finding Facebook content which its own metrics reported some 25 million users talking about.

Is such activity related to the eventual election results at all? Can it predict the election outcome, in …

When this site goes quiet, it’s usually because work is exceptionally busy. My apologies for the long silence since the launch of our major collection A Companion to New Media Dynamics – a range of projects, variously relating to the uses of social media in crisis communication, of Twitter in a number of national elections, of social media as a second-screen backchannel to televised events, and of ‘big data’ in researching online issue publics, have kept me occupied for the past eight months or so.

Now, I’m about to head off to Denver for the annual Association of Internet Researchers …