Back from "Summer Vacation"

Apologies for the long silence. This spring, my wife was transferred from the San Francisco Bay Area to South Jersey (near Philadelphia). Although you can always follow my latest political thoughts in amuse bouche form on Twitter as @TheLoki47, our cross-country move pushed my political blogging to the back seat for the summer.

Since arriving in Philadelphia this July, I've been focused on developing accurate Twitter polling for the upcoming elections. Sunday morning, I will release the first set of weekly results. These results represent my best efforts to aggregate political energy on Twitter.  Posting these early (likely buggy) results, is an effort to share more broadly some insights on campaign buzz and grassroots energy that I've had at my disposal for the past several weeks.

As a preview, below is a visual aggregation of candidate mentions for the past week.

I will explain (and improve) the algorithms over time. For now it suffices to note that these are "active" Tweeps (25+ political tweets this week) with "frequent" mentions (5+ this week) of a political candidate. Colors are a best guess at political lean and node size is indicates a higher volume (of tweets for tweeps; of mentions for candidates) and the red and blue nexuses are the hashtags #p2 and #tcot.

The biggest takeaways are:

1. The Herman Cain phenomenon is real (at least this week).
2. Fading candidates seem to show a high volume of "blue" mentions.
3. Although the Eastern Conference/Western Conference metaphor promoted by Chris Matthews is a convenient first approximation, the competing factions in the GOP are likely far more complex and overlapping than the metaphor suggests .

See y'all Sunday with much more.