Back in the day, when Twitter was just starting out, a lot of us recognized the performance art aspect of tweeting your day or taking pictures of a meal as you prepared it. But then we were actual people discovering our exhibitionist side. What do you call it when a character in a movie tweets […]
Watch democracy and Twitter evolve together
Twitter and politics are a natural combination. Politicians love getting their message directly to their constituents, and Twitter is the perfect vehicle. Journalists also love Twitter, and picking up tweets and turning them into stories is a great writing aid for any reporter. Tweets were important in the 2010 elections, but they will dominate the race for 2012. Join me as I dig into this fascinating exercise in public speech and democracy in action.
Now that I am following the intersection of Twitter and politics more closely, I keep finding articles about politicians around the world adopting Twitter as a way of communicating with constituents, like this one on the European Parliament or this one about Turkish politicians. Journalists attribute this to a desire to appear to appear modern, […]
The Truthy Project has done a great job of getting the story out about astroturf efforts during the 2010 campaign. The political press loves this type of story. It combines new media with gotchas aimed at politicians. What could be better? One phase of the political Twitter arms race is now defined. Campaigns will have […]
I’ve decided to make Twitter politics my major focus as an application of the Twitter API. The combination of easy access, huge numbers of people, and the ability to do analytics and datamining to extract targeted demographic groups makes Twitter the tool of choice for leading edge political campaigns. This is a field I want […]
MSNBC just had a segment on the relationship between social media and political momentum of candidates. Chuck Todd seemed amazed that the ranking of a candidate in polls correlated with the number of Twitter followers they had. The trend is clear. 2004 was the blogging election with Dean propelled by bloggers. 2008 was the online […]
