More NPR Twitter Fun During Tonight's Debate

We're down to the final presidential debate tonight -- and that means another NPR adventure in Twitterville.

As we've done for the previous debates, we'd like your help fact-checking the debates. If you hear the candidates say anything questionable and you have a URL for a primary source that disproves it, post it on Twitter and include the phrase #factcheck, including the pound sign at the start of the word. We'll monitor what you post and pass along any useful nuggets to our crack team of reporters fact-checking the debate. They'll blog the results here at Vox Politics and on our nprpolitics account on Twitter. If you don't use Twitter, feel free to post your fact-checks to this blog post instead.

Meanwhile, you can also take part in our "dial-test" experiment on Twitter tonight. We're interested in seeing how Twitter users react to the candidates' responses throughout the debate and graphing out those reactions. Here's how to participate:

Step 1: Follow @plodt on Twitter. The folks at plodt.com will be graphing the results, so you'll need to follow their Twitter account if you want your tweets to be included.

Step 2: Each time you want to rate a candidate's statement, format your tweet like these examples:

#dialtest *McCain 7.5* Good answer on protecting senior's pensions

or

#dialtest *Obama 7.0* Like what he said re: social security

By including #dialtest in your tweets, everyone will be able to follow along using this Twitter search page. And for those of you who are more visual, the tweets will be plotted on a graph in real time during the debate.This is all just a nutty little experiment on our part, so please take the results with a grain of salt. We're just interested in seeing how Twitter can be used to visualize public responses as the debate takes place.

See you on Twitter tonight!

-- Andy Carvin, aka acarvin on Twitter

2:30 PM ET | 10-15-2008 | permalink

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