BLOG: Jimmy Saville, among his many gifts, was acutely aware of how time slips away from us, perpetually moving us from now… to then. Hence his catchphrase, which was, I’m sure, a profound comment...

15 million people watched all or part of the first ever live televised election debate between our three largest political parties, delivering an average live audience of 9.4m. This was not only something quite new in the evolution of our democracy, but also a gripping bit of telly that got us tens of thousands Twittering, Facebooking and Googling – plus millions chewing it over in livings rooms and pubs across the nation. A programme like this reminds us that TV is the most social medium of all. In all the hype about social media’s important role in the Obama campaign, it’s often overlooked that it was the live TV debates and a huge TV advertising campaign that mobilized support for Obama in the first place, which the web then captured and amplified so profitably. The money that Obama raised online was then ploughed back into buying more TV advertising. Here you can read about ITV’s innovative cross platform approach to the debate, get the key social network figures and also find out how various types of analysis were used to monitor the performance of the contenders in real time. It’s a story of sentiment analysis, a worm and a place called Tweetminster.