Nate Silver becomes social media sensation

Nate Silver, the statistician behind The New York Times's popular FiveThirtyEight blog, won the polling election this week and quickly jumped to the top of the cultural zeitgeist on Twitter.

Silver's name was still in heavy use on Twitter on Thursday. On election night, after it became clear that he predicted the results of the presidential election with near perfect accuracy, use of his name spiked and became a nationwide trend, and mentions have been in the thousands ever since, according to analytics by Topsy.

On Thursday, Silver is also the central character in several parodies, including the popular "Drunk Nate Silver," which imagines Silver turning arrogant due to his accurate predictions. Prior to the election, Silver had been defensive about his polling model after taking severe criticism from those who believed the vote would be much closer than it ended up being.

Jon Stewart, interviewing Silver on Wednesday night's episode of "The Daily Show," suggested Silver call himself "Lord and god of the algorithm," but Silver has so far contented himself with promoting his book, The Signal and the Noise.

Silver cleverly tweeted a link to his book on election night that has since been re-tweeted nearly seven thousand times. Sales of Silver's book subsequently shot up 850 percent in 24 hours on Amazon to become the second best-selling book on the site, according to CNNMoney.

Silver's publisher, Penguin Press, and the Times also jumped on Silver's newfound popularity on Twitter, with the former offering book giveaways and the latter promoting tweets linked to users searching for Silver's name.

Silver on Thursday began making somewhat tongue-in-cheek predictions about 2016 on his own Twitter feed.

I know people hate 2016 speculation, but seems almost sure that the GOP primary is going to be totally fascinating.

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) November 8, 2012

Fearless (i.e. probably wrong) 2016 prediction: Heidi Heitkamp will become a popular target of VP speculation.

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) November 8, 2012

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