Progressives Try to Match Conservatives on Twitter
Given the fundraising success of the Obama campaign and the reach of the liberal blogoshere, many people assume progressives have the advantage when it comes to harnessing new media tools for political organizing.
But there is one service where conservatives dominate: Twitter, the free micro-blogging social network where users tell their friends what they are doing via "tweets" of 140 characters or less.
Conservatives as a community are currently better connected than progressives on Twitter through their use of hashtags. Hashtags are a code users paste inside each tweet which tags posts that are relevant to specific audie....
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One useful way to begin a dialog ...
Excellent article, Stefan; the balance of perspectives between Alan and Michael is useful.
And it's a great point from Michael that dialog and Twitter's decentralized discourse can benefit both the left and right. A straightforward way to begin dialog would be to focus on some hashtag standards, for example geography (state/county and state/district), office (gov/rep/sen etc.). It's in everybody's interest to share the same vocabulary and so interests are clearly aligned.
Also #tcot and #topprog will be facing similar challenges, including how to keep trolling, interference, and rendundant posts from rendering the channel useless -- and (more positively) how to use the channels and visualizations to get accurate feedback far more rapidly than traditional polling methods. Of course, philosophies are likely to be very different, and so the different groups may come to different conclusions about how best to do this; still, the discussions and sharing perspectives are likely to be valuable for everybody.
Does Michael -- or anybody else -- have any suggestions on the next steps for the dialog?
jon
Alan R. is a rockstart
Needs to be said.
Something is better than nothing
and Progressive will dominate Twitter soon. #Topprog is a start and the whole thing will evolve for the better. Just keep using it.