My post from Sunday, Everyone an Instapundit: How the Left Underestimates Twitter, drew a strong reaction both on Twitter and in the comment section. As one might expect in the starkly polarized political blogosphere, reaction was split. I can’t complain that it stimulated so much discussion, but there were some objections I’d like to address. To begin with, this comment by Oliver Willis represents a misunderstanding I did not anticipate, but had better explain better here:
[Y]our overall thesis seems to be that liberals aren’t on Twitter, which is not the case.
That most certainly was not my point. Consider that I’ve written two separate posts about how Barack Obama was, until fairly recently, the most-followed Twitter personality. In fact, the first of those posts openly wondered why then-President-elect Obama’s team had stopped tweeting on election day.
To the contrary, I am quite certain that there are more people on Twitter who casually identify as “liberal” than “conservative,” but they key word here is: “casually.” The difference is that Twitter users who self-identify as being on the Right are making a concerted effort to use Twitter for political ends. People who identify with the Left seem to be using it more for fun. Or as Willis put it in the same comment:
Do conservatives have more of a hashtag culture on twitter? Yeah they do. La-de-freaking-da.
Notwithstanding the power of “la-de-freaking-da” as an argument, not all of Willis’ political allies concur. Although hashtag use on the Left trails its use on the Right, there have been efforts to recreate this culture, albeit without great success. Tweetleft is a website aggregating hashtags associated with progressive causes. But if we use Flaptor’s Twist to compare #tcot and #teaparty vs. #topprog and #rebelleft, this is what we see:
The red line is #tcot; the blue line is #teaparty. The other two hashtags, among Tweetleft’s most popular, don’t even make a dent. My new Twitter friend Angus Johnston argued to me that the #amazonfail hashtag — used to identify tweets relating to Amazon.com’s recent (apparently unintentional) blacklisting of LGBT titles from sales rankings — was a good example of this. If we compare #tcot vs. #amazonfail over the past 48 hours — red again is #tcot and blue is #amazonfail — it is clear he has a point:
This demonstrates to me that a “hashtag culture” on the Left could easily outpace what the Right has now, if so organized. But it should not be overestimated, either — #amazonfail went viral and therefore pulled in many more people who may not have thought it a Right vs. Left issue. An overtly partisan or ideological effort — which most certainly describes #tcot — remains to be seen.
NYU’s Jay Rosen offered a PBS MediaShift column by my colleague Simon Owens — who also pointed it out to me — about RNC protesters using Twitter to communicate (spontaneous and not sustained) as well as Twitter Vote Report (not clearly an ideological project).
Meanwhile there are other examples of Twitter being deployed by the Right, and interesting developments therefrom:
- As I first noted in December, political fundraising on Twitter was first a Republican innovation, as spearheaded by the campaign of California Senate candidate Chuck DeVore.
- Conservatives’ use of Twitter was encouraged by Hugh Hewitt on his radio show. His producer Duane Patterson is even the sixth-most followed person on TCOT. Hewitt was also an early advocate of blogging, so his involvement here is no great surprise — but it’s a lot better than Keith Olbermann is doing.
- Among those “top conservatives” are some familiar names and brands: Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove and RightWingNews. But who are Bill Austin, Nansen Malin and Rob McNealy? Two are PR types (Twitter is lousy with us) but Malin is a member of the Washington State GOP Executive Board.
Like the blogosphere before it, Twitter is already bringing forth new voices and establishing new power brokers. At a time where the Right is casting about for new ideas and new blood, Twitter might have come along at just the right time. But the question remains: Will they extend their reach before the Left develops a stronger presence?
It’s absolutely true that, by itself, Twitter is a stunted communication tool. The brevity allows for faster communication, which also means less context and a greater likelihood of jumping to conclusions. Then again, the value of each individual tweet is infinitessimal and easily countered (the so-called 
The knock from lefty bloggers used to be (and 
This is fine insofar as it seems to be a fair point about the case in question. But I suspect it may also also fuel the dismissal of Twitter on its own terms. Twitter may not have been the tech of choice this time, but that seems to be more about Moldova and less about Twitter. After all, it was already 
In the past week or so, two online GOP operatives (neither of whom is David All) have separately suggested to me that the competition among the three Republican Internet fundraising websites is effectively over. Even 
But if you need further evidence that Slatecard is the take-all (no pun intended) winner of the online GOP fundraising tool primary, consider the image at right, taken from the sidebar of leading Republican activist site
Connecting the Decline of Blog Comments to the Rise of Social Media and Finding the Way Back
John Gruber writes the widely-read Apple-partisan weblog Daring Fireball (DF) and it’s a daily stop for anyone who follows the Cupertino iMaker closely. His blog has never allowed readers to post comments, drawing a challenge from sometime rival blogger and columnist Joe Wilcox, in a perhaps overly-aggressive post titled “Be A Man”, to allow readers to respond in the same space.
That explains why Gruber’s response seemed perhaps overly-defensive at DF this week. To allow comments or to not allow comments is one of the oldest in the blogosphere, one going all the way back to the first half of the last decade, but it’s been awhile since I’ve seen the issue raised in any kind of prominent way. Certainly I have not seen it since the rise of social media in the second half of the last decade, prior to the advent of Facebook and Twitter.
Quoting at some length, here’s Gruber reply:
The “it’s not a blog without comments” argument is one that was once frequently lobbed at righty bloggers, such as Instapundit’s one man band, Glenn Reynolds, from lefty bloggers on community, or “diary” sites such as Daily Kos and MyDD. In January 2006, when I was writing The Blogometer for The Hotline at National Journal, I offered some unsolicited commentary on the subject:
This is a little ironic, considering that Gruber’s political politics (as opposed to tech politics) are clearly left-liberal, as anyone who reads his site with some regularity has surely noticed. (Though he is surely an “Appublican” in the phrase of one clever comment, speaking of irony, here.) (And did I mention that The Blogometer was recently retired? For another discussion.)
Interestingly, Wilcox has now rescinded his previous challenge, and taken up Gruber’s not-actually-implied one, as he wrote (on his own blog, of course) in response afterward:
So the game is afoot, though I think Wilcox will prefer his own blogging style, and Gruber will probably give at most five words to it.
Meanwhile, fellow thinking Apple supporter MG Siegler has weighed in to say his views on comments have changed over the years, and he no longer has them on his personal site:
It may seem like everyone has a blog, but that isn’t truly the case. What is one to do? CK Sample III concludes in a post on his own blog:
I think that’s the right conclusion. Blog P.I. does have comments, but the only reason it still does at this late date is because I haven’t taken the time to close them (you may note that I haven’t taken the time to do much writing at Blog P.I. lately, either). When this site launched in 2006 and through the next couple years as I wrote alongside a couple of talented co-bloggers, this site did begin to develop a small commenting community (including Jim Treacher, now of Daily Caller fame).
A second effect is probably much more specific to this site: in 2007 I started writing about comment spam, political comment spam, Twitter spam and even political Twitter spam. Guess what happens when you start writing about spam? That’s right: you become a target of spam. I had to rachet the controls on my spam filters up so high it began to block legitimate commenters, Treacher included.
John Gruber may not want that, and that’s fine. His soapbox is indeed far bigger than mine, so he needs to think about managing his online presence whereas I would still be trying to promote mine (if I was actually doing that). There are probably many today who would still insist he is not writing a blog. That’s a matter of perspective, which says more about the wide range of opinion about what blogging is good for and supposed to be about. Some might even say that my own dearth of posts in 2010 has rendered it “not a weblog.” To which I would probably say: OK, then it’s not a blog. It’s still social media, albeit a relatively primitive form. Blog P.I. was state-of-the-art in 2006 but is behind the times today. (MyBlogLog in the sidebar, anyone?) I’d like to fix that, and maybe someday I will. In the meantime, I’ll be talking about politics and technology on Facebook and Twitter.