Target Point

Comparing Obama's Speeches

Last week President Obama gave his first State of the Union Speech, and we thought it would be an interesting exercise to see the changes in emphasis between Obama’s speech last year and his most recent address. 

In order to illustrate the differences we’ve created the following two images that compare the SOTU and his February 24th, 2009 address to the joint session of Congress...

TPC's SmartTarget Wins Reed Award

TargetPoint Consulting's SmartTarget System Honored as Best Use Targeting Technology in 2009 Elections. 

The second annual Campaigns & Elections’ Politics magazine Reed Awards were presented last Friday at the  Washington Marriott where top political and public affairs professionals were honored.  “Becoming a Reed Award finalist is tough.  Actually winning a Reed Award is only accomplished by the most impressive creative political and public affairs talent in the world,” said Jordan Lieberman, publisher of Politics magazine.

More White House Visitors

Last Friday, the White House released another set of visitor logs, the second release of a full dataset in what they promise to be an ongoing series. 

As has been the case with the first two limited releases and the first full data release, we are again mining the data to see what knowledge we can extract from it...

The Web Seer & 2012

An amazing new data visualization tool called “The Web Seer” allows you to visually compare output from Google’s new “suggest” feature, providing fascinating insights into what people are searching for.

To the unfamiliar, Google recently unveiled Google Suggest, an add-on to their search technology that makes smart suggestions as to how to finish your search, using other users’ searches as inputs.  Start typing “Washington” and suggestions range from “Washington Post” to “Washington State University.” 

Many web surfers have noted Google Suggest’s power not just as a productivity enhancer, but also as an insightful peek into the zeitgeist of the internet, quite often with hilarious results (see http://autocompleteme.com/ for more)...

White House Visitors

Over the holiday the White House released their first full set of visitor logs containing information on nearly all visitors to the grounds from September 16-30, as well as approximately 2,000 pre-September 16 records that were specifically requested. 

We have previously analyzed and visualized the first two rounds of the visitor log release here and here, but they were necessarily limited by the biased selection/discovery method through which they were made available.  This time, however, marks the first full release of all visitors to the White House (with necessary, but sadly opaque, exceptions made due to national security or confidentiality reasons).