Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both on Twitter, and it’s interesting to see how they use it. Obama has 6,661 followers and is following 6,793, with 73 updates in total, starting in April 2007. So that’s 132 extra people the Obama team are listening in to… presumably Hillary’s there somewhere?

On the other side of the fence, 953 people have signed up to follow Hillary Clinton. She’s tweeted 47 times, starting in January 2008, and is following precisely 0.

Both use Twitter mostly for updates on their locations and campaign appearances, so there’s not a lot of conversation going on, but there are a few thought pieces in there from both sides. John Edwards on the other hand, really seemed to have got the hang of it, much more personal, but then three months ago his tweets stopped, two months before he suspended his campaign for the Presidency.

 It’s easy to see how this affects their appearance within the online community. Clinton speaks but does not listen. On the other hand Obama (or someone in his team) immediately signed up to follow me. Someone who’s interested in my views? I doubt it. But it’s already helped me to form an opinion of him. 

Delving a little further into the personal and Web styles of the Democratic candidates I found that the New York Times catagorises Barack as a Mac and Clinton as a PC.  I’m just surprised they didn’t compare them to Google and Microsoft.

I found this rather beautiful message on the pavement near our offices. The translation according to Mike is ‘Look there is dog shit!’ and was written by someone over 60 as it’s in old german. But why would an elderly German be writing pavement messages near Liverpool Street, and where’s the evidence gone?

It was a joy to open The Guardian last Friday, and see these beautiful diagrams displaying statistical data on ‘The internet’s undersea world’. It really cheered me up on a cold, boring train journey out of London.

They are reminiscent of Minard’s depiction of the fate of Napoleon’s army, displayed in Edward Tufte’s book ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’. It’s a classic that seems to be getting a lot of press over the last few years – due partly to the rise in internet use.