Presidential Debate Live: 5 Social Media Front Seats

Confession – The twitterverse is far too big for me to keep up, especially when it comes to what is expected to be the first  live twitter presidential debate. Yes, the campaigns will be live tweeting their own commentary.

“The spin room which traditionally followed the debate will now occur in real time on Twitter,” says Peter Greenberg, Twitter’s head of political advertising.

So, I did what I do best when I’m overwhelmed, I started filtering for most valuable insights. I researched news outlets, hashtags and innovative curation projections. We all know where to find CNN.com but  where will we find the more unique and interesting social commentary?

So here’s the skinny on how to watch the elections through the social stream. Just click on the links below to go to where the conversation is taking place.

If you want to get the full flood of tweets, the two main Twitter hashtags are #election2012 and #debates (according to @WashingtonPost).

1. Al Jazeera’s @TheStream will be curating the real time Twitter presidential debates conversation under their #AJStream hashtag. No new debate-focused hashtag here, and I appreciate that. Keep the conversation going. I expect most international feedback will happen on this stream, as well as BBC’s (@BBCWorld) #PredictThePrez.
2. A newcomer on the Chicago press scene, The Medicare Newsgroup will be keeping an eye on medicare facts, under hashtag #MNGTalks. If you want to tune up your knowledge, MNG has prepared a factual summary of each campaign’s Medicare proposal.
3. Love Google+? The Washington Post will be hosting a presidential debate Google Hangout BEFORE the debate – the WonkFix Google Hangout, at 2pm ET on Wed., Oct. 3rd. Huffpost Live will also stream live video discussions, although at this time I couldn’t find a dedicated debate stream, but that’s something to watch for.
4. And for a bit of fun, Tumblr fans can enjoy a collection of animated images, aka animated giffs. According to their official blog, Tumblr partnered with Gifwich for live-giffing the debate.
5. For the data geeks, @140elect takes a data-centric view of the conversation, through what they’re calling the Twitter Election Horserace.  If you like data visualization in parallel with your news feeds, this is the place for you.  And guess who is winning the RT battle?

Please do share, what’s your favorite election pundit to watch on social media on debate night?