Late last week, I noticed many of the tweets on Twitter’s Election 2008 page contained links. A screen grab taken this morning shows that still to be the case almost one week after Election Day.

As a matter of fact, 355 of the last 500 tweets that contain “obama” also  include a link (as of about half an hour ago).

I created a Yahoo! Pipe to search Twitter for the last 500 words containing a keyword on a particular date. The pipe takes those items and returns a list of those that include “http://” — the items that contain links.

After seeing that Obama was tweeted 109 times per minute on Election Day, I decided to run both then-presidential candidates through the Pipe. I was surprised to find that less than 25% of the tweets on Tuesday contained links: 89 of 500 Obama tweets, and 109 of the same number of McCain tweets.

So I ran the numbers for the first seven days of the month. About half of the tweets about either candidate included links everyday except Monday and Tuesday.

Compare that to the volume of tweets (from my previous post), and it looks like the more people tweeted, the less likely they were to include links.

Tomorrow, I’ll show how these numbers compare to other popular Twitter search terms and all tweets in general.

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