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:

You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response. I don’t use comments on Wilcox’s site to respond publicly to his pieces, but somehow it’s unfair that he can’t use comments on my site to respond to mine? What kind of sense is that even supposed to make? And if there aren’t any comments on DF, how are DF readers “adding to the noise”? (I realize, alas, that DF readers do sometimes leave noisy comments on sites to which I link. But how is that an argument for allowing comments on DF itself?)

What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.

Is my soapbox bigger than Joe Wilcox’s? Yes it is. But that’s fair, because I built this soapbox myself. It’s my firm belief that all websites eventually attract the attention and respect that they deserve. The hard work is in the “eventually” part.

Used to be, back in the early days of DF, that those complaining about the lack of comments simply were under the impression that a site without comments was not truly a “weblog”. (My stock answer at the time: “OK, then it’s not a weblog.”) Typically these weren’t even complaints, per se, but rather simply queries: Why not?

Now that DF has achieved a modicum of popularity, however, what I tend to get instead aren’t queries or complaints about the lack of comments, but rather demands that I add them — demands from entitled people who see that I’ve built something very nice that draws much attention, and who believe they have a right to share in it.

They don’t.

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 certainly isn’t the case for all or perhaps even most right-leaning blogs, but there’s more than a strain of truth to this. Liberal blogs are on the whole more likely to enable comment boards than conservative blogs. … Liberal blog readers expect that a blogger make space available on their site to facilitate discussion, whereas conservative argue that anyone can start a blog and it’s not the responsibility of the blogger to give others a soapbox. It’s their soapbox, of course. The difference here is one of conservatives touting the virtue of ownership and individual initiative vs. liberals expressing a desire for community.

As lefty blog analyst Chris Bowers has observed, that there are more conservative blogs in the upper tiers, although the liberal blogs have in that range attract more overall traffic. Though there are doubtless multiple factors, one reason is because many liberals have gravitated toward these community sites. All those diaries on Daily Kos are people who otherwise might have signed up for a Blogger account and struck out on their own in the blogosphere.

So the online left and the online right tend to have slightly different ideas about what a blog is for, and on this point they’re talking past each other.

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:

I argued that comments add to the narrative. Fine, I’ll try it John’s way. Most Oddly Together comments are missing anyway, following a blog transition that broke the links … As an experiment, as of today, I’ve removed the Disqus commenting system from this blog for two weeks. If I decide to permanently turn off comments, I’ll write a mea culpa post and apology to John Gruber.

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:

I suppose my time at TechCrunch (and VentureBeat before that) changed my opinion. I came to realize that the vast majority of comments on popular sites are useless — or worse.

Like Gruber, I much prefer when people use their own sites to respond to something. That small barrier to entry seems to ensure that the quality of the discussion will be higher.

There are exceptions, of course, but they’re few and far between. And I feel like the comment problem on the Internet is getting worse, not better.

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:

Anyone who wants to talk to me can do so via Twitter.

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).

But then two things happened: The first has to do with social networking: In late 2006 I joined Facebook and early 2007 I joined Twitter, and most everyone who writes about technology and politics did so about the same time or not long after. With only anecdotal and in absolutely no way empirical basis for the claim, I would say this happened to many other bloggers, those writing about technology and politics and those writing about other subjects. In fact, a general decline in blogging has been the subject of some discussion in recent years. I can’t say that I have seen that, but I also can’t say that claim is based in empiricism, either.

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.

Will I turn off comments here? Not unless I return to blogging here on a more regular-type basis, and I don’t have any immediate plans to do that. Let’s say I do pick up the pace at Blog P.I., how would I like to incorporate feedback? The answer, I think, is some combination of integration with Facebook and Twitter. Facebook’s Open Graph (and before it Facebook Connect) is the most attractive option, provided I can find someone to plug it in at a reasonable price. In this way, people can comment on this site while friends of that individual may see the fact of their comment here back on Facebook. Twitter does not yet support such a service, but they’re working on one, and as Twitter tends to be more germane to political communications (at least among those I follow) I definitely want relevant tweets here.

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.

One of the more interesting projects I’ve been working on related to 3121 is the social advertising, which we launched last week concurrent with this blog. In fact, there is a chance that you are reading this blog post now after having clicked on one of these ads. And if you arrived here from Facebook or LinkedIn, then I all but guarantee it. And I know for a fact that you work on Capitol Hill.

In some ways, advertising on social networks is not much different than traditional online advertising: the creative (yes, that’s a noun) consists of text and a graphic, with a link to the page you want people to visit. But they can also identify key demographics with a much greater degree of accuracy than even Google’s Adwords (which we are also using). Members of Facebook and LinkedIn supply their own demographic information, which is great for finding just the people you want and only the people you want.

Want to reach single female college students in Boston, Massachusetts who are fans of Gossip Girl? Facebook counts more than 1,600. How about married thirtysomething men in Portland, Oregon who are fans of The Big Lebowski? More than 600 of them. The possibilities are endless.

In your case, if you do fit the Capitol Hill profile, you probably saw one of the two following ads:

As you may have guessed, Facebook also lets one zero in on just employees of the United States Congress. (How many? At least 7,500.) LinkedIn has a different system but one which is very similar: identify people who work in legislative offices, set that to Washington, DC and we hope you’re someone who is interested in 3121.

To begin, here’s erstwhile conservative John Cole making the former point:

Here is what I don’t understand about twitter. When blogs came out and started to rise in popularity, lots of folks in the MSM and elsewhere said “Great. Just what we need. The undigested, unedited thoughts of the rabble.” If blogs are the undigested thoughts, tweets are the orts.

Here’s Bloggingheads regular commenter B.J. Keefe, responding to new host Matt Lewis’ point — via my post here — that the Right is succeeding on Twitter:

Is this anything worth bragging about? What does it even mean, that there are more Republicans spewing out sound bites and ill-considered thoughtlets? … [G]iven the choice to “dominate” on Twitter compared to, say, the blogosphere, let alone actually getting people off their couches to go knock on doors, I know which one I’d pick.

Even as Markos Moulitsas has recently taken to Twitter, at least one Daily Kos community member decided to hoax the TCOT list about the contents of the stimulus bill — “$2 million for Shamwows” — and with some success, too. (On the other hand, this guy makes a good point.) And here is Gavin M. from Sadly, No!:

Twitter is that new thing that’s like burping the alphabet. Republicans are big on it because they have nothing to say.

He is being glib (what? impossible) but this is a trend, all right. What’s driving this attitude? We can’t ignore sour grapes — for the first time in a while, the Right is being recognized as doing something online better than the Left. It only makes sense the Left would want to minimize that, both to reassure themselves, discourage the Right and encourage skepticism among outside observers.

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 “self-correcting blogosphere” in fact wasn’t, but the Twitterverse may be different).

Of course, there is a lot more to Twitter than 140 characters, thanks to its API and developer community. For those who may have not been following it closely, Twitpic lets you share pictures. Power Twitter embeds those photos (and links to YouTube) on the page. Utterli lets you post audio. Services like Bit.ly make it easy to track clicks on links you post. Both Farhad Manjoo and David Weinberger have recently explained how Twitter users have compensated for its limitations.

Twitter’s homepage famously asks “What are you doing?” but, famously as well I think, the vast majority of Twitter users ignore this question and say whatever they think needs to be said. Twitter is what you make of it.

Because the Left has seized higher ground on the wider blogosphere, the Right has turned its focus to Twitter, and Rob Neppell’s TCOT has helped them organize things like the aforementioned Tea Parties. Of course, this is why the Right went to the blogosphere eight years ago: they perceived the mainstream media as being controlled by the Left. There is obviously a pattern here, and it owes to the Right often considering itself in an oppositional role to the prevailing culture. (This is the same reason why the right-wing editorial positions of the tabloid New York Post and tabloid-y Fox News are so compelling: being oppositional is controversial and being controversial is fun.)

Interestingly, the Left turned to blogs in 2004 because they had lost an election and felt the media had turned against them, too. The difference is that the Left did not have a grievance culture already, and so had to create one. They did, and much of the credit for this has to go to Media Matters, whose founder David Brock literally wrote the book on The Republican Noise Machine.

The knock from lefty bloggers used to be (and still sometimes is) that conservative blogs didn’t have comment sections, supposedly because they couldn’t abide the awful things left-wing bloggers imagined right-wing commenters would say in such comment sections (even as conservative bloggers were making a cottage industry of cherry-picking the most outlandish comments out of Daily Kos, Democratic Underground and the like). Now with Twitter the complaint seems to be entirely the opposite: It’s all just chatter, there is no message to convey, &c. It’s one giant comment section.

But which is it? Well, it’s kind of both, right? Instapundit’s blog has long resembled a Twitter feed: short blasts of information with a link to longer commentary elsewhere, maybe a point of commentary and sometimes a photo as well. Twitter makes it possible for many more people (if not literally anyone) to be a clearinghouse of information for news and opinion, with Twitter itself nearly being a middleman like Google. The most-followed accounts on TCOT have tens of thousands of followers, and those with far fewer followers can specialize.

Why is this different from the blogosphere? It all has to do with the platform itself. In fact, it has a lot to do with the fact that Twitter is a single platform. Consider trackbacks, which were once supposed to be a way for bloggers to let other bloggers know they had linked to one of their posts. There was never a standard for trackbacks because blogs could be on Blogger, TypePad, WordPress or any other CMS or even be hand-coded, and so they never quite worked. But Twitter’s Replies tab (or as it’s been lately renamed, @USERNAME) works like a charm. Likewise, the column of recent tweets from those you follow provides a sense that others are reading what you write moments after you have said (tweeted) it.

Let me be clear: I do not mean that Twitter will grant everyone who signs up an Instapundit-like following. What I do mean is that by streamlining communication, Twitter significantly lowers the barriers to moving stories the way Glenn Reynolds does. And so few have shut down their blogs entirely; instead they are using Twitter to promote what they write in longer form there. The Twitterverse has not so much replaced the blogosphere as it has brought it closer together.

And yet Twitter’s efficacy as a communications medium is being questioned, too.

There’s a story going around lately — see TechCrunch, for example — about Moldova’s “Twitter Revolution.” If you’re not familiar with the situation, a series of anti-government protests in the Eastern European country have been widely perceived — see also CNN, for example — as being largely organized on Twitter.

Interestingly, this is probably not what really happened. The case has been made, persuasively to my mind, that Twitter’s user base in Moldova is too small to have been useful, and that so-ten-minutes-ago Facebook and decidedly unhip LiveJournal likely played a bigger role. It so happens this argument is primarily being made by blogs associated with the Left.

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 key to early news coverage of the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Imagine if Twitter had been around on July 7, 2005, where mobile phones were used to convey images from the scene. Had Twitter (not to mention Twitpic and Qik and the iPhone) existed then, more images, sounds and even video would have been posted quickly, aiding police and rescue workers.

Just because it wasn’t necessarily Twitter this time does not mean that it won’t be involved next. Of course a Twitter message can be cluttered with @s and hashtags, but the tweet is not always the last word or the end of the line. It’s more medium than message.

The Left should not be so quick to scoff about Twitter. If they laugh it off and fail to develop networks and innovative uses, they will fall behind, appearing relatively disconnected and even slow. Likewise, the Right should not rest on what it has already created, as it did by not continuing to improve its blog-based infrastructure following the 2004 election. If TCOT is the extent of the Right’s innovation on Twitter, they’re toast as well.

Neither Huffington Post nor Twitter are making any money right now, but if I had to choose one, I’d definitely pick the latter.

Photograph of Moldova protest via Cornel Ciobanu/EPA.

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.

Zing.

So the Right had a vibrant ’sphere in the post-9/11 Warblogging Period, which drifted after the 2004 election, as frustrated soon-to-be-ex-Pajamas Media bloggers can tell you. The Left owned the YouTube era, which happened to coincide, not coincidentally, with President Bush’s second term. Their political blog infrastructure was developed largely on the participation of bloggers and blog readers, not anyone using Twitter yet, most of the time because Twitter did not exist or see any significant usage until SXSW 2007. (You know who I can’t find on Twitter? MoveOn.)

For at least a year now, the Right again has been leading the way on an Internet-based communication platform. So far it’s to organize for Conservatism somewhat broadly as a unifying cause. Top Conservatives on Twitter is not quite a MoveOn for the Right — a whispered-of but ultimately mythical animal not unlike the “Party-in-a-laptop” idea popular with some Neoliberals — but it could have more value as a list than Gingrich’s own Drill Here, Drill now efforts and even the (also short-time) #dontgo message it spawned last August.

These new conservative projects are often built around Twitter itself. Sometimes this results in really annoying tweets, but at this point the right is doing more interesting things in this space. Twitter is smaller than Facebook, but makes up for it in volume of press hits (hopefully someone with Nexis can back this up for me) and news reports that its traffic is about to go all hockey-stick. Maybe it will go Galt as well.

Conservatives also have other, much older infrastructure whose blogging component counts a few successes but still relies on decidedly Web 1.0 websites, and so hasn’t taken as big a hit in the Great Blog Crash of 2008-09. And like companies of the dot com crash (including Google itself), the concepts and websites that clawed their way out of the rubble did not and will not bring back substantial returns in the short run.

Twitter, by its sheer simplicity, is kind of a Long Tail product in that we can (and often seem to actually do) use it in spare moments between the day, which means its audience could approach that of e-mail (especially since, you know, you need an e-mail account to join Twitter). Either could build that kind of reach, depending on who experiments more through the rest of the arbitrary era proper.

Using #TCOT vs. No Hashtags Whatsoever:

According to Internet marketing blog Hubspot, the right’s #TCOT momentum means it vastly outnumbers the hashtags left-leaning Twitter users and bloggers… er, aren’t listed as using, not here at least. Hmm. So which hashtags do the left use?

Late intermission.

Turns out the left-verse doesn’t do hashtags at all, that I could see from checking these accounts on Sunday afternoon:

• markosmoulitsas
• jedlewison
• matthewstoller
• ttagaris
• janehamsher
• Atrios
• ezraklein
• glenngreenwald
• KagroX
• openleft
• mmfa
• owillis
• mattyglesias

My question for the Left is whether the port side of the Twitterverse will adopt the same habit of hashtags that moves stories — and if it does, whether it will even be led by the Kos-Greenwald-Marshall-Hamsher-Klein-Stoller-Yglesias Netroots movement. And my question for the Right is whether they know any of the Top 5 Conservatives on Twitter, because I haven’t got a clue.

Benchmark note: As of today, Markos Moulitsas (2,411) has 7,288 fewer followers than John Culberson (9,699).

Update: In the comments, @myrnatheminx — whom I tweeted alongside at TransparencyCamp during a @Leslieann44-led Sunday discussion — points out there is a website collecting progressive hashtags: Tweetleft. And as she observes, organized hashtag use lies beyond “‘the usual’ accounts.”

Twitter experienced another milestone last week, although you may not have noticed: Tweet for Chuck, a fundraising drive organized by the nascent campaign of Chuck DeVore, a California state assemblyman who is gearing up to take on Barbara Boxer in 2010. As far as I can discern, this is the first time Twitter has been put to this use.

Although it’s very early yet in the cycle, the last few weeks have seen a big jump in use of Twitter by conservatives, if the just-launched TCOT website (aggregating and ranking conservative tweeters) is any measure. The move should give DeVore some degree of online cred and visibility that few candidates yet have — at least among conservatives, and at this stage they matter most.

The image below, from the front page of the website, explains how it works better than any summary I could offer:

Further down the page, donors are listed along with their Twitter profile picture, the amount they donated or pledged, and whether other donors had listed them as a referrer:

By tweeting the donation to one’s Twitter followers, the campaign gets a free one-time use of that donor’s account and the chance to solicit additional donors. The same network effects that made Twitter even more conducive to passing along news about the Mumbai terror attacks than perhaps even the blogosphere could end up producing a tool more effective for fundraising than blogging as well.

Twitter is a more intimate experience than blogging, so a candidate on Twitter (as DeVore is) can to some extent simulate the access donors frequently get at traditional fundraising dinners. A candidate couldn’t really be expected to write a whole blog post thanking specific donors, but a tweet is just the right vehicle for such acknowledgment, and DeVore’s campaign has been doing just that.

Moreover, DeVore is on the right track so far, working with blogosphere and political veterans Josh Trevino and then Justin Hart and even contributing blog posts at the recently-launched GOP state blog network Red County.

It’s been said before that political movements tend to innovate in fundraising and message delivery when they’re out of power. With Barack Obama’s Twitter account recently falling silent while DeVore is taking it in a new direction, we might just be seeing that happen already.

Update: Don’t miss DeVore’s comment on this post.

For 168+ hours now I’ve been working literally around the clock — to be more accurate, one revolution of the hour hand each solar day — finding and spotlighting blog posts from national and state-level media and political blogs, and running a Blogads campaign involving changes to the artwork and copy reflecting each evening’s developments (I like how it’s rendered on BuzzMachine best). I’ve also done C-SPAN TV twice, sitting on the back of my sport coat, focusing just beyond the camera lens, depending on the bug in my ear for cues, reporting on the latest buzz from the left- and rightosphere from the offices of New Media Strategies.

This week my role shifts, and in a dwindling few hours I’ll be flying to St. Paul, Minnesota for the Republican National Convention. As the NMS Blue Team returns from Denver, the Red Team will be shipping out to the metropolitan area where the Coens’ Fargo mostly took place. I travel both in my capacity as a representative of C-SPAN at the convention as well as an official, RNC-credentialed blogger, so I will do my best to share the experience with you.

This will be a new thing for Blog P.I., but a second time for me as a blogger at a GOP convo; in 2004 I was part of Hotline’s convention team in New York City, and I blogged the convention in my off-hours. Then, I took some pictures with my crummy first-ever Sprint camera phone, most of which were uploaded to a server I long since forgot to pay for. This time I’ll be blogging it here in this space, using my iPhone camera and WordPress app, available free of charge from iTunes (which by the way now is really crying out for rebranding).

For the next five days or so, I expect to be taking photos and posting them with minimal presentation, reserving most of my reporting and commentary for a widget from my Twitter account, which will appear here shortly. This is basically the opposite of what Blog P.I. has been in its two years-plus existence: whereas my blogging has primarily comprised several times-weekly essay posts (such as this one) I will instead switch to frequent, quick-hit posts that will take you inside the moment (I’m pretty sure I can do this).

If you’re going to be in the Twin Cities this week, gimme a shout (see the contact page). If you know me from e-mail or the Blogometer or Blog P.I. and want to say hello, drop me a line. If you know of a party, breakfast or similar event that’s either open-invitation or you can extend one, consider me interested. Need a mug, thumb drive or baseball cap emblazoned with the C-SPAN logo? We can probably work something out.

And but so, I’ll get back to packing a week’s worth of my least-unprofessional attire and making sure I don’t leave anything behind, with the DVR playing the Oregon Ducks’ 44-10 victory over the (Huck the) Fuskies as I close up shop here and make my way to the Lesser White North.

More coming soon.

What I can offer are details about the Convention Hub microsites. There will be two, one for each convention, with video and blog coverage around the clock:

• C-SPAN will provide exclusive video from the conventions, and for the first time, this C-SPAN video is searchable, clippable and embeddable. As someone who has tried (unsuccessfully) to jerry-rig an embeddable C-SPAN video in the past, this is a huge leap forward.
• NMS will feed the latest convention reporting and blogging to the Convention Hub pretty much non-stop. Or as our official language puts it, “extensive real-time blogosphere coverage using NMS’s proprietary combination of software and trained human analysts.”
• More about that software another time; all I can say is that it answers the questions I’ve asked about such analysis tools.
• The Hub will also include Twitter feeds of users using the hashtags #RNC08 and #DNC08 (and surely other tags, as their usage rises).
• The site goes live at c-span.org/politics later this month. The Democratic Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/DNC08 and the Republican Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/RNC08.
• NMS will have a presence at each convention to help to facilitate coverage and promote the Convention Hub. It certainly doesn’t hurt that we have bloggers credentialed to both (see you in St. Paul).
• There is more, but I’m not exactly sure what I didn’t see in the press release that’s public, so I’d better hold off for now. At the moment, this is the only public hint on c-span.org:

Meanwhile, the C-SPAN Convention Hub is already drawing praise from one of C-SPAN’s (few) notable critics. The Sunlight Foundation has differed with C-SPAN before over distribution of copyrighted C-SPAN video, so they are enthusiastic about the open nature of the Convention Hubs:

The convention announcement marks a new moment for C-SPAN as a modern Internet information provider. Once a small cable channel with a dream; now with embeddable web video, Twitter hashtags, and aggregated blog posts.

As a longtime C-SPAN junkie, I couldn’t be more proud to play a small part in this project. How dependent am I on the C-SPAN network?

• I wake up to Washington Journal every weekday morning (my Twitter account will bear this out).
• Before I found podcasts, I’d listen to streaming Realplayer segments from the program (I still listen to the podcast of Brian Lamb’s Sunday night Q&A).
• Back in college I would sometimes wake up early (4 a.m.) to catch particular episodes live, such as the first of the Hitchens-Sullivan conversations with Lamb, shortly after 9/11.
• If it’s the weekend and my television is not on baseball or football, it’s on BookTV.
• The tagline of my personal blog, The Washington Canard, is: “Where C-SPAN is the local TV news.”

The good news is that it’s a supportable addiction.

And by way of conclusion, a confession: I want this searchable video for my own reasons. On Election night 2004, The Hotline worked all through the night covering the coverage, as the election tipped from Kerry winning the exit polls to Bush winning the popular vote. If you’ve seen my Facebook photo, this is where that crazy image comes from.

As usual, C-SPAN cameras were in the office for Chuck Todd and Vaughn Ververs to offer recaps, also deep into the morning hours. Sometime around 3 o’clock in the morning, I informed friends watching the coverage from back on the West Coast to look carefully: As the cameras rolled, I picked up a plastic trash bin and… well, I danced through the background.

The waltz, I think.

I entered left with vulcanized dance partner, twirling across one shoulder, behind the talking head, past the other shoulder, exiting right. To this date, it’s still my best television appearance. And I look forward to the day, much sooner now, that I can embed this on Blog P.I.

Here’s one from today, noticed first by a colleague and concerning the Twitter account @speakerpelosi. Check out these two screen shots:

Whoops! The two posts went up within minutes of each other, which you can’t tell on account of Twitter’s imprecise time stamping (instead it just says both went up 2 hours ago). The tweet is still available on David All’s account, but is now gone from the fake Pelosi account. I suppose that’s about all the proof we need.

Is this just a cheap gotcha? If you think he’s done anything wrong, then perhaps so. I’ve been following the Twitter debate over this, and I think it’s been overdone: I don’t see how it is a TOS violation, and calling it sock puppetry is defining socks down.

I think the only thing necessarily wrong here is carelessness. Fake websites and joke accounts are fun, but they require a degree of caution that not everyone is up for.

If there is one other thing that’s wrong here, it’s the violation of Egon Spengler’s good advice: don’t cross the streams.

Update: It appears that David is now turning into the skid — probably a better way to handle it.

Even at one day fewer (two if you don’t count #nn08’s low-key Sunday) the bipartisan-ish Personal Democracy Forum generated remarkably more Twitter noise than Netroots Nation, and apparently not much less in the rest of Internet news.

Netroots Nation had House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivering a speech on the main stage, certain to be covered by political reporters on the beat, but PdF had Arianna Huffington, arguably more Internet-famous than anyone in congressional leadership. The partisan nature of Netroots Nation probably attracted many from the substantial New-Old-New Left netroots movement, more than Personal Democracy Forum’s awkward mix of Obama-emboldened NYC progressives and McCain-indifferent DC conservatives. This despite the minor Twitter scuffle over Huffington’s imperious remarks.

It’s worth noting that NN’s location — Austin, Texas — is the same as SXSW (#sxsw) and its Interactive Festival, the locus of Twitter’s first widespread adoption in March 2007. On the other hand, PdF took place in midtown Manhattan, which by virtue of population and proximity surely has more Twitterinos (also, Tweeps) close by enough to at least tweet about not making it up/down.

But I think the best explanation for PdF’s modest Twitter supremacy is that, like SXSW and unlike NN, the audience it attracts is younger and more reliably tech-oriented. After all, the surveys show that liberal blog readers are older and primarily motivated by politics than the average Valley startup founder. One was first about tech, the other politics.

Meanwhile, the ever more ubiquitous micro-blogging service’s strong showing at the political conference probably bodes well for its long-term mass acceptance.

Assuming Twitter isn’t down, of course.