I can't believe I'm typing this

Marlon Marshall, BarackObama.com

   to me 

D. --

I'm so jealous of you that I can barely write the rest of this email.

Imagine shooting hoops with Carmelo Anthony, Patrick Ewing, Sheryl Swoopes, Kyrie Irving, and Alonzo Mourning. Oh, and you'll get to meet President Obama and Michael Jordan over dinner, too.

Now stop dreaming and make it happen. You and a guest of your choice could join President Obama and some of the greatest basketball stars for a special night at the Obama Classic.

Pitch in $3 or whatever you can, and you'll be automatically entered for a chance to win.Because you've saved your payment information, your donation will go through immediately:

QUICK DONATE: $3

QUICK DONATE: $35

QUICK DONATE: $50

QUICK DONATE: $100

QUICK DONATE: $250

Or donate another amount.

Hit the court with Patrick Ewing and Melo? Trade stories with the President? This is the kind of stuff your kids will tell their kids, and no one will believe it until you show them a photo.

Don't worry if suiting up with hoops stars isn't your thing.

I know you've got a kid or a friend who would love nothing more than to play with their heroes while you cheer them on from a courtside seat.

If you've been waiting for the right moment to chip in and support the President, it's time to get off the bench.

Donate $3 to automatically get your name in the hat:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Obama-Classic

Even though I'm jealous, I hope you win.

Marlon

Marlon Marshall
Deputy National Field Director
Obama for America

The Twitter Political Index

Want to see who is ahead in the presidential race based on tweets and only tweets?

Today Twitter launched its Political Index, a dedicated site at http://election.twitter.com, which will show whether President Obama or Republican candidate Mitt Romney is in the lead based on millions of 140-character messages.

“We started by looking at the explosion at tweet volume since last election. There were 1.8 million tweets on the election day in 2008.  That’s about six minutes on Twitter today, “Adam Sharp, Twitter’s head of government news and social innovation, told ABC News. “We were looking at follower growth and audience reaction to the State of Union and what we discovered was that the conversation, which were happening in a measurable public space, could be used to create a real-time index.”

The Twitter Political Index or TwIndex, as Twitter calls it, is an attempt to quantify all those tweets and data. The company has teamed up with a social media analytics firm named Topsy to analyze tweets with different words related to the campaign. Topsy looks at a number of things in a tweet — words, phrases, combinations of words, etc. — when assigning a positive or negative rating. Like an approval rating, the index scale runs from zero to 100. Topsy and Twitter are also working with two polling firms – Mellman Group and North Star Opinion Research.

ABC News has employed a similar system on its OTUS News site with the help of Bluefin Labs, which analyzes social sentiment from publicly available Facebook & Twitter comments, search, trending, and influencer data. Similarly, the London Eye ferris wheel currently changes the color of its lights based on London’s Twitter sentiment surrounding the 2012 Olympics.

The http://election.twitter.com site is live  and showed President Obama having a higher rating than Romney, though it is down by -4 since yesterday.