The UK Election on Google Maps

There doesn't seem to be much evidence that Google will be producing a Google Map to show the results of the UK General Election to be held on Thursday of this week. The Guardian, Channel 4 and Tweetminster have teamed up to produce a map of votes in real time. The map is inspired by Ben Marsh's now legendary #UKsnow map.

So far there doesn't seem to be any clues as to which mapping service will be used but I expect it will be either Google Maps or Open Street Map. The map itself will show Tweets including the tag #ukvote alongside the first half of a post code. The map will not be showing who people have voted for just who has voted.

For this election there has already been a number of Google Maps mashups that are using Twitter to show real-time comments on the campaigns of the main political parties in the run-up to polling day:

Geo.me: UK General Election

Geo.me has produced this Google Map to display geotagged tweets over a constituency map of Britain.

The map displays the new 2010 constituency boundaries released as Ordnance Survey Open Data, coloured by the notional 2005 election results, as provided by the Guardian Data Store.

Twit Vote UK
If you can't wait until Thursday to cast your vote then you can vote on Twit Vote UK. Using Twitter and Google Maps Twit Vote UK hopes to give an overview of people's voting intentions around the country.

If you have a twitter account, you can vote using the format,

"@twitvoteuk, postcode, political party"

Your vote will then be displayed on the map based on your postcode. You can only tweet your opinion once every 24 hours.

Electwits.co.uk

Electwits.co.uk is another Twitter and Google Maps application trying to track the real-time conversations around the upcoming UK general election. The application tracks the positive and negative comments made on Twitter about the leaders of the three main political parties in the UK.

To post your support for a party leader simply tweet the politician's name, a happy smiley, your postcode and the tag #electwits. For example, "Nick Clegg is the boss :-) #electwits SW1"

If you Tweet your postcode your message will appear on the Google Map. The application also displays a number of graphs to show the number of positive comments made about each of the three candidates for Prime Minister.

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