CNN has already started posting speculation news about the end of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

A month ago I posted this blog headline to gauge how early you could post a “potential” news story and pick up traffic.  A month later, that post is number 2 on Google and has seen a bit of traffic come in over the weekend.  Not much, but it is the second spike after the initial posting.

My point in the experiment was to unearth how much of competing in the digital age is going to be about being not just the first to report breaking news, but the first to predict it.  CNN does this a lot already and then replaces existing predictions with real details as they come in.  It’s a smart way to get traffic.  It’s also shows that users will consume “potential” news as quickly (perhaps even quicker) than real news (but the tabloids new that already.)  Nothing really new to report here other than that it’s getting harder and harder to find actual news reporting without the chatter and prediction.

It will never go away either.  Interactivity has taken over.  We now print, read and tell ever evolving stories as news.  Don’t think there’s any real loss there accept that we’ll not have very good snapshots in time of events like we do now in archives.  The news evolves so quickly we don’t even really have snapshots of any moment in time.  Then again, those snapshots are inaccurate the second you save them.  Somewhat of a contorted uncertainty principle here.

Anyhoo…  I’ll see how this Headline does against the last one.

Fun!

Can I predict bloggers/blog readers voting preferences based on which headline they respond to?

NOTE:  This headline and series of upcoming posts is a SOCIAL EXPERIMENT.  I am attempting to do an informal poll on key future headlines.  I will be testing a series of headlines of the coming days to see which ones get the most response in the various blogging inter connections.  Partly I want to know how far out in front of a potential news story you have to be to get the traffic and I want to measure how willing people are to read the news they want to hear versus the news that is…

what’s your take?

Quantcast Demographic Info:
Hillary
Barack

Compete.com: Hillary vs. Barack

Alexa:

Check here. 

Quantcast:

Conclusion:

It’s tricky! however, I think we need to normalize the traffic by demographic as raw volume is not a good predictor at all (very low correlation between results+exit polls and internet traffic). See here for detailed information on results and polls.

No conclusion yet…

Next Steps:

I will be mashing all this data together to show trends overtime. AND, i will be overlaying it on tools like PolicyMap to show how Internet (general and social networks) + real world policies + polling locations + business all works together.

Amazing that we have all these tools and an incredibly small set of people uses them. Oh, that’s not amazing nor surprising – perhaps frustrating.