Election fever is everywhere. Online, you can feed your fixation with an endless stream of polls, pro bloggers, YouTube videos, or Twitter election updates. And whatever the result tomorrow, the punditry has only just begun.

Here at Crimson Hexagon we’ve been monitoring what blog RSS feeds are telling us about people’s perception of the candidates. We’ve searched and pulled down a whole bunch of feeds, determined categories based on those results, and then filtered the opinion to find: What does the blogosphere like least about John McCain / Barack Obama?

Here’s what we found:

McCain
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Obama
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When you start to track foibles over time — whether McCain’s or Obama’s, we noticed that campaign tactics are something our monitors flagged for the negative watch list.  We also can see how real-time events influenced people’s opinions: the launch of the Britney/Paris celebrity ad resulted in a big backlash against McCain’s negative campaign tactics that has only escalated. Obama’s much ballyhooed infomercial?  Generated a huge amount of discussion, 3x of any recent prior event for him, but the sentiments in those discussions were more of the same.

The New York Times is declaring that technology and Web 2.0 capabilities were a palpable force in this campaign. We believe that we’re just beginning to see the impact of distilling the opinion from a wide range of voices.

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