There's a good chance that by now you've seen this post by Ben Smith, as it's burning up the Twitter -- somehow breaking through the clamor of aimless chitchat on the platform. The gist: a study by Wyeth Ruthven for the firm Qorvis Communications looked at the use of Twitter in the recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts (pdf). The finding that leaps out is that 40.55% of all tweets therein constituted "pointless babble."* (The video above is a recent interview with Ruthven on his study.)

"More than 40% Blather!" is a juicy confirmation of what we all might want to think of politicians and their silly Twitter habits. But it's worth considering what pointless babble means here. In the study, Ruthven glosses it as "off message tweets, personal observations not related to the campaign."On Twitter (natch!), he says that he borrowed the "technical term" from a study last August by Pear Analytics. Here's how Pear says they determined which tweets were pointless babble in their research, and which were more meaningful...

If you are one, you'll have to find something else to blame. A new report from the fine folks at Pew compares the social isolation and integration of those Americans who regularly use the Internet and mobile phones compared to those who, I guess, read books and go bowling instead. (It's worth noting that the metric that Pew is using here is only the extent to which we have discussions with other people, rather than other kinds of social engagement.) This is the sort of research that helps flesh out the promise of using connective technology to build civil society and the political realm, and what Pew has to say here sets the baseline -- we're not all socially isolated, at least not because we spend time on the computer. Sayeth Pew...

A report we recently touched on, a work sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation and which found that online townhalls boost both citizen engagement and politicians' approval ratings, has become the target of ire coming from the right side of the political spectrum. If you're wondering how a rather dry study of e-participation entered into partisan crosshairs, the deal is that Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn, whom you might know is an OBGYN, doesn't think political science is an actual, you know, science science. (Or as he prefers to call it, political "science.") And so Coburn has been leading the charge from the Senate against the $9 million that NSF spends on political science research a year.

Coburn picked up on the National Science Foundation-sponsored report, and tweaked it for its focus on helping politicians confront bad approval numbers rather than helping patients confront bad diseases. Being a political scientist, David Lazer, the report's lead author and director of Harvard's Program on Networked Governance, tracked from there how his report became public enemy number one, and his look at how information travels and morphs across the web is fascinating. 20/20's John Stossel, for example, added an extra bit of partisan zing by suggesting that the partly taxpayer-funded report on online townhalls was a way of helping politicians avoid the unpleasant face-to-face confrontations seen during this summer's health care public forums. Check out Lazer's take for a deeper reading of how a study on e-participation got caught up in partisan political battling.

It's Friday, so let's geek out a bit. NIST, the office within the Commerce Department responsible for setting standards and measuring stuff, has released a rather awesome new video explaining their development of ultra-refined microwave sensors that just might be able to measure the universes gravitational waves "a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang." What they find might prove or disprove a theory called cosmic inflation, which holds that the universe we see before us went through an amazingly rapid expansion in the very instant after it first came into existence. Check it out.

For the very first time in the recorded history of all of humanity, the 2008 election saw adult Americans who went online to engage in the political process outnumber those who didn't. Pew's Internet & American Life Project has a new report out that finds a full 55% of American grown-ups got on the Internet to get news about politics or the campaign (60% of adult Americans did this in '08), talk about politics with others (38%), or use specific tools -- i.e. Twitter, IM, email -- to send or receive messages about politics (59%).

One finding that jumps out from the Pew report is that Americans are trending towards relying upon sites for news and commentary that share their political perspective. In 2004, 26% of people who go online for politics reported that most of the sites they visit are in line with their political point of view, rather than a neutral source. In 2008, that moved up seven notches to 33%. The numbers are more striking for younger folk. In 2004, 22% of online users between the ages of 18 and 24 reported that a majority of the sites they visited shared their point of view. This cycle, that nearly doubled to 43%.

But that doesn't necessarily mean we're all wallowing in a pit of likemindedness. It might, instead, just mark the fact that we're consuming news for more sources. Even if I obsessively read the (objectively non-partisan) New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post online everyday, I'd only have to hit four ideological blogs in a day to make "most" of my sources slanted ones.

Here's another statistic from the Pew report that might catch your attention: supporters of John McCain were more likely than supporters of Barack Obama to be Internet users, 83% to 76%. Pew attributes that to the finding that Republicans tend to be wealthier and more highly educated than Democrats -- both strong predictors of Internet use.

The full report is here.