The Democratic Party of Virginia settled on a nominee for governor this past week, choosing state senator Creigh Deeds over two better-known rivals, including former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe. (On the Republican side, Bob McDonnell was unopposed for the nomination.) Following the race, Virginia blogger and Wikipedia contributor Waldo Jaquith posted about “Wikipedia’s role in Sen. Deeds’ nomination“, featuring quotes from a live discussion WashingtonPost.com. Wrote one voter:

I voted for Deeds. The WaPo endorsement really helped. I started doing the research this weekend and was disappointed that the WaPo did not have a quick guide the issues. I searched for a half an hour and did not find a quick rundown of the candidates and the issues.

Also, Deeds had a wikipedia page about his past stances. That really helped. The other two did not have similar pages.

Interestingly, the specific page quoted — “Political positions of Creigh Deeds” — has been merged back into the main Deeds article, but the content appears intact. Jaquith writes:

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Wikipedia is going to play a large role in year’s Virginia elections. The campaigns that a) understand that, b) harness that and c) do so in a fair, unbiased way will reap the benefits. The campaigns that ignore Wikipedia or attempt to manipulate its information in a way that is anything less than fully truthful will be penalized accordingly.

In fact, that seems to have already occurred in the primary. As noted in an overexcited but basically correct diary at Daily Kos last week, ““You can’t handle the truth!” TMac’s dogs scrub Wikipedia of facts” supporters of McAuliffe did remove sourced information, none of which has not been restored as of this writing.

In the first instance, material about a land deal and disgraced Democratic fundraiser John Huang because it “lacked NPOV” (i.e. not written from a neutral point of view), and in the second about business deals involving Telergy and inPhonic “for being unsourced.” Well. Lacking a neutral tone is cause to rewrite a section, but not a reason to delete — certainly not as a first resort. Second, the inPhonic material was properly sourced, and better than deleting the Telergy section would have been to find a citation. On the other hand, this goes both ways — the material was almost certainly added to cast doubt upon McAuliffe’s fitness for office, and according to the discussion page about McAuliffe’s article, much of this criticism popped up just days before the Tuesday primary vote. And so it goes.

So now the Commonwealth turns to the general election where, if Jaquith’s prediction is correct, the articles about Deeds and McDonnell will be both important resources as well as the locus of battles to establish narratives about each candidate. Indeed, both articles are the top non-official sites listed in Google searches for each candidate’s name. (Another important article will be Virginia gubernatorial election, 2009.)

As yet, Deeds’ article is the better one, in part because of the aforementioned section outlining Deeds’ political positions. His article is also somewhat more active, probably due to the active primary, and more experienced editors working on the page. Recent contributors to Deeds’ page include Virginia resident John Broughton, who literally wrote the book on editing Wikipedia, whereas most recent work on McDonnell’s page has been done from unregistered accounts represented only by the user’s IP address. Jaquith, for his part, has recently edited both.

It’s a good bet that, after the summer, editing on both articles will ramp up as November draws closer. It will be interesting to see how they develop.

If Twitter doesn’t turn out to be just the latest political fad (like, say, psychographic polling, or Ron Paul), then it just may be the worst thing to happen to politics and its attending media since a couple of geniuses at CNN dreamed up “Crossfire” back in the 1980s. It’s not that Twitter doesn’t have a value to society. Its ability to spread news (as in the emergency landing of a plane in the Hudson River) or to circumvent repression (as in Moldovan youths organizing protests) has already proved transformative. But not every new mode of communication lends itself to politics, where speed and complexity rarely coexist. The capital might be a better place if it became a Twitter-free zone, a city where people spent more time talking to the guy serving the coffee and less time informing the world that the coffee had, in fact, been served.

This is in the right ballpark, but it’s still a foul ball. For one thing, as I’ve explained before, the Moldovan protests were not principally organized on Twitter, yet Bai’s mention here indicates it is likely to become a popular media myth for some time to come.

And though Blog P.I. has been recently accused of engaging in Twitter triumphalism, I’ve also made the point that Twitter is best as a way to create and communicate the existence of connections between messages and ideas rather than to communicate complete thoughts — “more medium than message,” as I’ve put it.

It’s not that Twitter does not “lend itself to politics”; it’s that Twitter does not lend itself to explanations of concepts or, typically, careful debate about such issues. Bai notes that Twitter is good for its ability to spread news, but this hyperconnectivity has as many implications as there are kinds of information that can be tweeted.

Here I must clarify my statement that Twitter is not ideal for debate, because I have seen it work. Not quite a year ago, Personal Democracy Forum co-sponsored a Twitter debate between representatives from the Obama and McCain campaigns (including my future NMS colleague Liz Mair). And sometime last year — I can’t quite seem to locate it — I watched a fascinating debate about gay marriage between Michael Turk and Gregory Cole. Just this past week, Evan McMorris-Santoro at The Hotline conducted a “Twitterview” with ex-DNC chairman/VA governor candidate Terry McAuliffe. McAuliffe’s replies were necessarily curtailed and so not terrifically informative, but there’s something unique about holding this kind of interview in a public setting, where anyone can comment on the discussion, even as it is occurring.

Twitter Search is necessary but not sufficient for presenting the full scope of discussion for readers arriving after the live event. Better tools for organizing and displaying these conversations on blogs are needed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is where the Twitter API is headed next. Already there are editorial services like McMorris-Santoro’s Word on the Tweet and Danny Glover’s Hill Tweet News. Another interesting question is whether 140-character tweets are too short to be made sense of by mostly algorithm-driven aggregators like Gabe Rivera’s Memeorandum (and Techmeme). Hashtags combined with Slashdot-style meta moderation may be key to making such a service realistically work.

The point here is that it can. Bai and others see Twitter’s 140-character limitation without giving consideration to the unlimited possibilities for development of the platform. And here I’ll risk borrowing from one of the hoariest clichés in business and technology to say: you have to think outside the tweet.

Given the choice between “Crossfire” and Twitter, I know which one I’d pick.

N.B. I will say this for Matt Bai: at least he made an honest effort to understand Twitter for what it is, unlike this inane interview/column by (who else but) Maureen Dowd, wherein Twitter’s Biz Stone comes off a thoughtful fellow under MoDo’s faux-withering interrogation. If you subject yourself to reading it, I recommend as antidote Nancy Friedman’s parody, “Ms. Dowd Interviews the Inventor of the Telephone.”

And what’s this, just one story in the category right now? C’mon, Digg. You can do better than this.

And I don’t care where you go with it — 2012 presidential election? 2010 congressional midterms? 2009 New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial campaigns? — but you’ve got to start living in the now.

Supporters at the press conference included Stanford professor Larry Lessig, former FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, environmental activist Van Jones, a venture capitalist from the firm which first funded Twitter, Google’s chief evangelist Vint Cerf and Josh Silver from Free Press. That’s the same Josh Silver I criticized back in May for claiming the only real news was his kind of news.

Also on the panel: Republican consultant David All, whom I count as a friend and whose work on Slatecard I admire but with whom I disagree on some matters of policy and partisanship. I’m not the first to note the incongruity of this panel; if you happened to check out the comments at All’s TechRepublican starting this weekend, Mike Turk initiated a very interesting debate with All on the merits of the group continuing through today.

David has called Internet for Everyone a “bipartisan” organization, which Turk has also called into question. All’s claim seems very hard to justify, based on the names above. For one thing, the only other reference to Internet for Everyone as “bi-partisan” comes from Brian Reich at Fast Company — who is, coincidentally, a former Gore campaign aide. Meanwhile Tim Karr of Free Press didn’t bother to include the word “bipartisan” in his announcement at Huffington Post.

But I was reminded of a tweet from @DavidAll the evening the conference ended:

And in a post on Saturday, All did concede that the bipartisanship of the group was tenuous:

As one of the only Republicans in the coalition (Vint Cerf of Google is a registered Republican), I believe it’s crucial for Republicans to embrace a national broadband strategy.

Curious about Vint Cerf’s Republican bona fides, I decided to punch his name into OpenSecrets.org. For the sake of column width, I’ve removed his employers (principally MCI, MCI Worldcom, Worldcom and Google). Here’s what I found:

Finally! Proof that Vint Cerf is a Republican. Well, maybe he was once a Republican. And so, David’s claim that the Internet was Republican from the beginning has a fighting chance. But Cerf is clearly not a Republican now, in fact he has been quite an active Democrat since approximately the Reagan administration.

There are certainly times when cross-ideological partnerships are a good idea, such as when Redstate’s Mike Krempasky, Adam Bonin and Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos came together to fend off campaign finance restrictions on bloggers. But it concerns me that David All — one of the C&E-recognized rising stars of GOP Washington — is giving ideological cover to an organization which is not just non-conservative and not just un-conservative, but whose basic idea treats limited government and market-based solutions as beneath discussion.

P.S. I hope this doesn’t dissuade him from watching the rest of The Wire.

Had the Republicans lost their two special election contests to replace deceased GOP House members, one would see the papers filled with analyses of the coming debacle for Republican hopes in 2008. Now that they have won both handily, expect most to either ignore the races altogether or chalk up the wins to local Republican strength.

Indeed, about the closer-watched Ohio election the Washington Post merely ran an AP story on A02; the Viriginia story ran on B05 in the Metro section. Neither buried, but neither featured. Had Weirauch had won, the anti-Republican mood of ‘06 would seem to be continuing. So it’s kind of funny where the Post chose to cut off the wire report:

But Democrats had high hopes about Weirauch’s chances against the younger Latta. This was her third run for the House, and last year, against Gillmor, she received the biggest share of the vote — 43 percent — of any Democrat in the district’s history.

I noticed the same dearth of barking from the blogs, too. Here’s everything the Memeorandum algorithm deemed significant this morning:

And the whole story was off the page by the beep of twelve.

Daily Kos featured just one recap of the special election, which seemed very bitter even after explaining how the NRCC had spent a big chunk of its cash on hand:

The Republicans are still trying to pretend that 2006 was an aberration. Yet they have to go all-out, it seems, to hold the ground they already have.

Yes, I was hoping for a better performance in this district. Yes, I’m disappointed.

Meanwhile, the RNC’s Jason Richardson said nyah in a post for GOP.com and at RedState, focused not on the party committees, but on the extra-party support apparatus:

Weirauch had heavy support from the DCCC, Daily Kos, Act Blue, Nancy Pelosi, Charlie Rangel, Harry Reid, and EMILY’s LIST. We were severely out-manned in Ohio and Virginia and this is what they have to show for it? We came to the game to win. All in all, the liberal blogosphere should take heed: You’re not as powerful as you think and it’s about results not PR.

To be sure, these were retentions and the Virginia election was never much of a contest. But the Ohio race between Republican Bob Latta and Democrat Robin Weirauch was a focal point of both parties in recent weeks, with both parties’ house committees pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the district. Online, Slatecard and Big Red Tent both spotlighted the race and sent out fundraising pleas; Slatecard raised $1,908 from 21 supporters. Meanwhile Weirauch apparently collected more than $93,000 from ActBlue, some $15,600 raised by the Daily Kos/Open Left-backed Blue Majority and $12,300 by Wesley Clark’s WesPAC.

One race was obviously a dud and the other would prove to be one, too. It’s hard to nationalize a special election, and there was no Paul Hackett. In fact, there was barely an Iraq debate — though the Democrat in the Viriginia race, Philip Forgit, was an Iraq veteran. So the leftroots raised more money, but the rightroots (if not Rightroots) ended up with the win. But neither the leftosphere nor rightosphere owns this win or loss. This race just wasn’t won or lost online. And if it was a status quo election, Republicans have to be pleased with that.

Update: I somehow managed to miss Eric Pfeiffer’s understated observation, posted just after the beep-beep of twelve-thirty:

Bloggers Respond With Restraint to Yesterday’s OH/VA Special Elections

At least.

Wait. I think I need to do an exaggerated double-take, for comic effect:

Forty bucks? What is this, a college-level textbook? A coffee table book? Merely oversized? Is it 800 pages? I buy enough books that my Amazon Prime account pays for itself, and I can’t remember the last time I shelled out this much for a book that wasn’t out-of-print.

For comparison, here are the Amazon listings for other recent (though indeed they are all recent) books about politics and the Internet:

These aren’t all new, and they’re not all hardcover. But you’ll see that the two released this fall — the tomes by Graff and Bai — are indeed hardback, and with Amazon discounts they cost less than half of “Netroots Rising.”

It is certainly the kind of book I would be inclined to buy. I bought most of the books listed above, mostly from Amazon, and mostly when they were brand new. But at forty bucks, I may just have to apply for a library card.

I didn’t agree with Gilliard much, and I don’t know Texas Nate at all, but I agree this development is worrisome. As I pointed out last week, it’s not the first time entries for bloggers have been so nominated — and as that effort was beaten back then, so should it be now.

As a Wikipedian in good standing, I added my two cents, reproduced below:

The article certainly needs work — indeed, it was only begun upon the announcement of his passing on Sunday — but more to accord with Wikipedia style polices rather than meet NPOV guidelines.

When the big book on the liberal netroots is written, Gilliard will be more than a footnote. Wikipedia has the ability to record that now, and I believe it should.

Update: Good news — after a string of “keeps,” the silliness is over:

Easy call here. The only arguments for deletion are thinly veiled personal attacks. The New York Times only does obits if you are notable. Also, the claim that one must be notable enough to be in a paper encyclopedia is patently absurd. Agreed, notability should be considered, but in Mr. Gilliard’s case there is absolutely no question about that.

Tasteless politicization is in the eye of the beholder, however. To an advocate of concealed carry, the observation that a legally armed student or faculty member might have made a huge difference on the day in question is nothing more or less than common sense. To an advocate of gun control, the observation that Cho Seung-Hui’s actions were expedited by his ability as a resident alien to legally purchase handguns is similarly uncontroversial. Of course, common sense is another thing that is liable to be interpreted rather differently from blog to blog. In that spirit, former Suckster Chris Bray has some worthwhile things to say.

Meanwhile, there’s something muted and occasionally plaintive about most of the pro-gun-control commentary — even the Brady Center seems to have acknowledged that the issue is not really in play at the moment. (Alex Koppelman bemoans this state of affairs in Salon today.) Affiliated websites like Stop the NRA define the problem as follows:

…it is much too easy for the wrong people to get high-powered, deadly weapons and our leaders fail to do anything about the problem. [Emphasis removed.]

As always, it is extremely easy to determine who the “wrong people” are after the fact, and rather harder to do so in advance. Stop the NRA’s website doesn’t contain anything more specific than the organization’s name.

It should be noted that this kind of magical thinking is hardly confined to the anti-gun movement. Roy Edroso links to this wonderful thing, for instance:

And I’m sorry, some will really think me foolish, but I don’t think dorms should be co-ed, so that crazed, jealous boyfriends can enter their girlfriends’ dorms and kill them and the innocent young men who come to their aid. If it had been a single-sex dorm, the killer might not have been able to enter so readily.

Call me a pessimist, but I don’t think a rule forcing crazed, jealous boyfriends to loiter outside the dorm instead of waltzing right in would necessarily have the desired effect. Any prediction tailored this specifically is vulnerable to reductio ad absurdum – after all, if Virginia Tech refused to admit Korean students as a matter of policy, Cho wouldn’t have been in a position to murder 32 people there. (If anyone has seen this argument being made with a straight face, please let us know in comments.)

The endless wrangling can be construed in a light that is at least vaguely positive. A hope that there might be a way, in principle, to somehow prevent mass murders from happening in the future is a fundamentally decent, abstract human impulse. In order for it to be articulated as policy, though, it must be tempered by other human impulses, such as the suspicion that this is all the fault of the bastards on the other side.

What was first reported as loud noises soon horrifically became 24 down and three killed, counting the killer’s parents, murdered the night before. Despite my relative proximity to the crime scene, but perhaps not surprisingly, I remember it mostly through the media: The initial radio report whence I’d first heard that “gunshots rang out” at Thurston, then a friend of a friend who was there calling in to CNN’s now-defunct Talkback Live and, much later, Rolling Stone’s in-depth coverage and the Frontline documentary.

One thing we didn’t have was Facebook. Today, students with accounts who couldn’t get through to their family and friends have been using it to let people know they’re all right:

In fact, a new group was started today called I’m ok at VT, already with 1,983 members. Remember Virginia Tech (4/16/07) has 1,885. An event concurrent with this very post, Student Gathering at the Drill Field, has 99 confirmed guests. And I’m sure that I’m only scratching the surface.

ABC News has taken notice of the activity, plastering an image (below left) of Facebook on their front page and quoting one registered user (whom I couldn’t locate) taking strong exception to the administration’s handling of the initial murders:

They could have prevented most of this…shooting at 730 in WAJ, classes don’t start til 8, why couldn’t they cancel classes for the day … SOMEONE WAS SHOT AND IT TURNS OUT THEY DIED … I THINK THATS GROUNDS TO CANCEL CLASS RATHER THAN SENDING OUT AN EMAIL THAT SAYS USE CAUTION AND REPORT ANYTHING TO POLICE. They could have save almost 20 lives and 20 injuries if they just decided to cancel class right away.

Facebook is a fairly closed system, so I would normally say it wouldn’t become part of the permanent record of this event. But this event is also a criminal investigation, and it’s entirely possible the killer will have an account of his own. Or maybe a MySpace page — he wouldn’t be the first mass killer to have one.

If the rumor is true — originating on the TechSideline.com Hokie fan board (via Hot Air via Dan Riehl) that “this all started with an ex-boyfriend finding his girlfriend in bed with another guy,” would you really be surprised if he’d blogged about it first?

And while not so eyebrow-raising as before, it’s still more than a little amusing:

Well, I suppose it is nice to know he doesn’t regret becoming a member of the U.S. Senate. But has anyone broken the bad news to Wes Clark?

However, I do wonder what is the point of a politician (not seeking national office) devoting staff time to a gimmick like Facebook. It won’t raise money, it won’t get his message out, and even if it does, almost certainly not to his constituents (and certainly not those who actually vote). Perhaps this is his last update until 2012, or at least until the next recess. Meantime, he’d be much better advised to take his official blog off hiatus.

And while I again caution against reading too much of anything into anything that happens with a politician’s social networking page, this (not currently on Webb’s page, but visible on your own, if you’re one of his Facebook friends) still makes you wonder:

That doesn’t make him the first born-again atheist senator, does it?