Friday 16 April 2010

Picture Perfect

By Nigel Middlemiss, Knowledge Director, Echo Research

One great thing that readers of the online and offline press can enjoy which Web 2.0 and broadcast consumers don't have is cartoons. They're a killer app when it comes to dismantling a reputation with a few scornful brushstrokes. And elections are happy days for cartoonists as some of their favourite targets, politicians, climb onstage. Thursday's 3-way TV debate produced a crop of sharp drawings underlining the distrust the political class tends to inspire currently across the board.
The Independent had all three leaders standing at their podiums, Clegg with a long wooden Pinocchio-style nose, Cameron with an equally long forked tongue, and Brown with his pants seriously on fire. The Times had a similar take, as in Peter Brookes' cartoon (reproduced here with Peter's permission).

Peter Brookes, The Times

The Guardian was less cynical. The paper that started life as a Liberal broadsheet showed Nick Clegg as a hero mouse wielding a massive executioner's axe, and Brown and Cameron as two medieval villains trembling in their boots.

No matter what your political stance (or state of progress in coming to one), I think you’ll find clever encapsulations of campaign moments to be found in the next 3 weeks at:


The opinions and views expressed in this blog are the personal opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Echo Research, its staff or any of its affiliates.

posted by Echo Research @ 07:29   0 Comments

Thursday 15 April 2010

Twitter archive – references of the future

By Katherine Henden – Account Manager, Echo Research Ltd.

I came across some interesting news that the Library of Congress is to archive every publicly posted tweet. It has been estimated there are around 55million tweets a day, which is ever growing, so this will be quite some task but will create an information monster.

This got me thinking about what this means for future generations who will be able to search back to the big events of our time and get first hand feeling and opinion. They will be able access incredible information like President Obama’s thoughts at being elected, see how compassionately the world reacted to the New Orleans and Haiti disasters, get first-hand accounts of the war in Afghanistan and see just how much of a viral/ social media phenomenon Justin Bieber became.

How amazing would it have been to have access to this kind of information while we were at school? In history essays you could be quoting Martin Luther King for many inspirational words other than his “I have a dream” speech, you would have read exactly how Nelson Mandela felt after his release, seen public opinion on the moon landing, the instant reactions to the JFK shooting (maybe even viewing the twitpics) and so many other events that have shaped the world. The archive will also have great implications for anthropological and cultural research in the future.

The internet is a powerful tool which has already altered the way we communicate. The archiving of twitter posts will revolutionise the way we look at history in the future. Public opinion and instant sentiment is now at everyone’s fingertips. This is definitely an exciting time to be living in and I for one am thrilled that my tweets will be a part of it.


The opinions and views expressed in this blog are the personal opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Echo Research, its staff or any of its affiliates.

posted by Echo Research @ 07:40   0 Comments