BBC Twestion Time Takes Off with bbcqt hashtag: 3000 Tweets in one Hour
A Twitter conversation about BBC Question Times started up on 23rd April with a few “political blog” people having an online debate, enlivened by David Starkey making a pitch for the pantomime villain slot on Question Time.
That has built up each week, and after four weeks we have had the “MP Expenses” saga, we had 3000 Tweets during the programme itself on the #bbcqt hashtag and a lot more since from (my estimate) a couple of hundred people, including quite a few from outside the online politics niche.
This post is tracing where the Twitter hashtag has come from, and how it has grown over a month. It’s my own account, and I’ll be pleased to correct anything I’ve got wrong.
Where did #bbcqt come from?
On 23 April I suggested “Interrupt Count” as a measure of who had “lost” a studio discussion; those who talk over their opponents lose, and asked for volunteers. Inevitably that generated a discussion on Twitter during the programme to count the interrupts.
I think the hashtag #bbcqt evolved before that first programme (I tried #bbcquestiontime and was overrules by the concensus).
Others in the mix included jounalism student Fabienne who writes Gift of the Fab (@gift_of_the_fab) and Mark Littlewood @markreckons.
The first edition covered was on 23 April, where David Starkey appeared to come to the BBC Studio in character as a cross between Janet Street Porter and Sir Norman St John Stevas and talked (for some reason) about “velvet knickerbockers”, and had a go at almost everyone – including that “feeble country” Scotland.
Cris Hawes (@crishawes, who contributes here, gave a post-match report the next day.
And week four (14 May 2009) was the “MP Expenses Bearpit” edition, which went haywire, as might be expected.
Crunching the Numbers
I’ve been trying to estimate how many Tweets used the hashtag #bbcqt during Question Time, which runs from 10.40pm to 11.40pm. These two screenshots from Twitter search show the Tweets at about 11.19 and 11.40 – one third of the programme (the timestamps are on Greenwich Mean Time, which is one hour different from BBC time).
There were 70 screens of 15 Tweets each between the two, so in this third of the programme period there were 1000+ Tweets (or around one per second).
And how many people were Tweeting? I’d estimate several hundred, but that’s a rough guess and excludes “watchers”.
One fascinating piece of information revealed was that the Telegraph has had 25 staff working on the MP Expenses investigation over several weeks.
An Onlne Bearpit?
I’m not sure. It seems more civilised than the comment boxes on some blogs. I think the jury is out on that one, so I’m withholding judgement.
The scandals and alleged scandals around Parliamentary allowances are swamping everything at the moment, so we need to see how the weekly debate develops – there is certainly some real debate there alongside the anger and satire, though.
A Straw in the wind for Political Engagement? Maybe
My one serious political point is this: the mantra “people aren’t interested in politics and need to be engaged” is wrong. It is the wrong way round.
It should be “people aren’t interested in politics that have disengaged from them”.
I don’t believe that. Is this part of the way back? We’ll see.
Wrapping-Up
Finally, two Twitter technical points.
I followed the debate using Twitterfall, which is probably the best tool to manage a high-volume Twitter stream and has many options. The Tweets shown can be restricted by geographic area, or filtered by names, hashtags, or text strings.
We are beginning to see the emergence of “hashtag spam”, where advertising Tweets are posted to popular hashtags. I’m hoping that the limited time which #bbcqt operates will help avoid spam, but – again – we can only wait and see.
[Update: @davidcushman (blog: Faster Future about online publishing - roughly) points out that #questiontime was also running, triggered by @cluetrainee (blog: Cluetrainee about weird and wonderful numbers from the Internet), at a lower volume than #bbcqt.]
Categories: All WW, Blog Platform, Labour, LibDem, Media, Miscellaneous, News - Current Affairs, Number Crunching, Political Blogging, Politics, Tory
Wow – so I was there at the beginning of a new mass movement! Feel so proud to have contributed to this blossoming of popular democracy. QT will have to take note of us in the end
Twitterfall is by far the best way to keep track of #bbcqt – I also use the colour option to highlight which tweets use this hashtag. I think though that if it becomes much more popular, then twitterfall will struggle to keep up.
>Wow – so I was there at the beginning of a new mass movement! Feel so proud to have contributed to this blossoming of popular democracy. QT will have to take note of us in the end
I don’t know yet
I could just have my head partially up my own rear end.
QT will have to notice us eventually! We need Dimbeleby to mention #bbcqt at the start of the show!
The problem I had with following the tweets was the sheer volume made it nigh on impossible to keep up with! I had to set Twitterfall to 1 per second to have any hope to keeping up! And at that speed, it’s very easy to miss tweets.
It is interesting how fast it has grown – lets just hope it doesn’t grow so big as to be too unwieldy.
ThunderDragon´s last blog post..MP expenses: Labour hit most in poll slump so far
Last night did seem like a breakthrough moment. Twitterfall seriously struggled to keep up more than once but one of the consequences of this was that it was nigh on impossible to keep up with conversations which had developed in previous weeks. I got to the end with a whole host of @replies which I hadn’t noticed.
Anyone got any suggestions on how we can get the BBC to stand up and take notice?
Jeeves´s last blog post..Aung San Suu Kyi jailed again
>Anyone got any suggestions on how we can get the BBC to stand up and take notice?
They were several BBC people Tweeting on #bbcqt, including @radioproducer who does stuff for PM and iPM, and Pods and Blogs for ages before that. They’ll pick it up – I’ve dropped him a note to point to this article.
#questiontime was running as well, though at a lower volume.
M.
Hi Matt. (I work in the Beeb but do this sort of stuff for Radio ..@rooreynolds will probably pop by later. he does social stuff for TV) Thanks. Really interesting piece.. . I’ve been fascinated watching this grow and chucked in a few tweets last night. Its good seeing how this type of social watching can self-organise. I’ve had a go myself at http://www.goodradioclub.co.uk/ at trying to lead/host this sort of stuff but for beeb radio programmes and still not quite sure if a) it scales beyond a few hundred b) struggling to find tools that cope and keep paying attention c) with radio its even more difficult And you’re right about the spam starting to turn up about 30-40 mins into some fairly high trending…and is it users engaged in politics or engaged in tv ?
Oh There’s already some low level tweeting going on but is there a tag for Any Questions ? btw
Of course the mother of all live social viewing is tomorrow night across a whole continent…
sorry. that comment was a bit any questions itself. tx again.
Jem Stone´s last blog post..links for 2009-04-17
Heh. I live blogged Eurovision last year.
Here: http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2008/05/24/eurovision-song-contest-live-blog/
I’m a trainee Wogan, but my video inserts from back then are struggling.
If anyone has info to add on the origin of #bbcqt – e.g., if you originated it before we started talking about “interrupt counts”, then please do comment and I’ll add it in.
Just as a point of interest, there was a small group of us using #bbcqt well before April 23rd. Before the Easter break in fact. @markinreading is one, as was @KerryMP . I mentioned it on my blog as far back as March 6 – http://marcnobbs.blogspot.com/2009/03/question-time.html and http://marcnobbs.blogspot.com/2009/03/todays-tweets_05.html
As early as Feb 18 I was using #questiontime
http://marcnobbs.blogspot.com/2009/02/todays-tweets_19.html
but switched to #bbcqt the following week.
Thanks Mark – great to have the extra information. I’ll let the comments run for a bit then update the post.
>there was a small group of us using #bbcqt well before April 23rd. Before the Easter break in fact. @markinreading is one, as was @KerryMP
That asks interesting questions about propating hashtags, and blog audience profiles.
Will reflect.
I switched from #questiontime to #bbcqt on advice from @marcinreading – he was watching for both tags at the time. Those of us commenting in Feb and March decided bbcqt left more room for actual comment.
I think that’s how it happened.
Marc Nobbs´s last blog post..An Interview with Laura Smith #KbaR
For me it started 21:37 November 15th 2007. The txts on Ceefax 155 had just got so interesting – very funny and very poignant. Just had to leap in txting my tits off. Got carried away with the idea that it was MORE fun txting than *watching* and relaised I was getting to know the small cmmunity of txters. So blogged about them on http://questiontimetxters.blogspot.com. At 6.50pm on Febrary 2006, I sat down for QT and thought Twitter was the right thing to do. Grew from there. Neglected the folks on txts though
they are still the funniest. Also, introduced Peruvian Earthworm into the discussion for some reason.
Mark Adams´s last blog post..
Thanks Mark and Marc.
[...] around MPs’ Expenses and described as the most vigorous Question Time ever, there were around 3,000 Tweets during the one hour run of the [...]
[...] around MPs’ Expenses, which was described as the most vigorous Question Time ever, there were around 3000 Tweets during the one hour run of the [...]
[...] around MPs’ Expenses and described as the most vigorous Question Time ever, there were around 3,000 Tweets during the one hour run of the [...]
jack straw is every bit as bad as nick griffin,he talked about british subjects right to marry people from other countries,and yet i myself married a girl from the philippines and had to struggle to get her into this country