[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?

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.”

In our previous installment, I went digging through WHOIS to determine the availability of domains calling for the impeachment of 2008’s crop of presidential contenders. It may be too early to consider any of them locks for their respective party nominations, but it turned out that it’s not too late to plan for their removal from office.

I’m not sure these observations are worth much, but obviously I believe they are worth a blog post:

• According to the available information, it appears that none of these domains were registered prior to 2003 and most were snapped up in just the last year, which suggests that all the the resgistered domains in fact refer to the each candidate, and not say, other people named Clark or Paul. This seems to be true even of ImpeachKerry.com and ImpeachKerry.org, but it is also possible they were previously maintained through another registrar.
• The biggest category of registrations are those with no identifiable owner: They are controlled through private registration intermediaries Domains by Proxy and the more obscure Domain Discreet of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. These include all the Edwards sites save one, ImpeachHillary.org and ImpeachHillary.net, ImpeachKerry.com and ImpeachKerry.org, ImpeachBrownback.com and — for some reason — ImpeachPaul.com.
• Which campaigns might have secured some of these domains? I found no smoking gun evidence, but if any, most likely John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. The registration of three Edwards-related domains through Domain Discreet — on different days but within two weeks of each other last December — is at least chin-stroke worthy. The .org, however, was registered 10 months earlier and through Domains by Proxy. If any one candidate is most likely to be hoarding domains, it’s Edwards — but that isn’t saying much. Clinton knows a thing or two about impeachment, but that’s about it.
• The identifiable registrants for Hillary Clinton’s sites are split among three individuals. I attempted to contact each, but as yet none have replied. Norman Livingston of Boynton Beach, FL owns ImpeachHillary.biz, but he seems to be un-Googleable. Michael Miller of Cincinnati owns ImpeachHillary.info, and there is an outside chance he is Republican lawyer and former Franklin County Prosecutor Michael Miller, although it would be quite a commute to Columbus. ImpeachHillary.com — the one domain which could conceivably fetch twenty-five large in a future online auction, belongs to another Miller: Mark L. Miller, a San Diego attorney and family man — apparently neither the Republican money man nor the Kentucky state police commish.
• Meanwhile, Obama sites are like potato chips — you can’t have just one. In late December, Michael Meder of Emeryville, CA helped himself to .net and .org. Then a few days after Obama’s announcement, Robert McKee of Austin, TX picked up .us and .info.
• The exception is ImpeachObama.com, which was registered to an entity called Registered to Protect From Squatters on July 15, 2004 — two weeks before Obama delivered his famous convention speech. The constitutional visionary here goes by the name DomainGoon, and he’s a pro, controlling ImpeachGilmore.com, ImpeachBiden.com and ImpeachVilsack.com as Script Registrations. (He — really, what woman would call herself “goon” anything? — maintains other prized domains, such as abughraib.com, registered two days after the April 2004 “60 Minutes II” report.) I believe it’s fair to credit him with ImpeachClark.com and ImpeachPataki.com — those are owned by a company called Sunlane Media LLC, which shares the same Encinitas, CA address and contact information as Script Registrations. Most of these were registered in the second half of 2006, but ImpeachBiden.com was picked up in December 2004, the day after Biden told Don Imus: “I’m going to proceed as if I’m going to run.” And ImpeachClark.com was registered Sept. 11, 2003, the week before Clark threw his hat into the ring the last time. The guy is good.
• John Wall of Cincinnati ties with DomainGoon for the most impeachment domains, but has the clear edge in both candidate and TLD prestige: ImpeachMcCain.com, ImpeachRomney.com, ImpeachRichardson.com, ImpeachGiuliani.com, ImpeachGingrich.com and ImpeachGingrich.net. All but Romney were registered on June 19, 2005 — the exception was registered on the surprisingly late date of December 2006.
• ImpeachBiden.org belongs to someone named Daniel Cook of Chicago, who has owned it since November 2005. According to Amazon’s social network 43 Things, Cook or someone with the same “cookforpresident” handle wants to “have sex a lot,” “have sex today,” and “have sex eight times in one day.” As yet (if 43 Things is up to date) he has accomplished none of these things. Just saying. Also, I don’t know which Cook is being referred to, but my money is on Dane Cook. Which would explain a lot, but not the interest in Joe Biden.
• Mini-tycoons include Joseph Culligan of Miami, FL (ImpeachMcCain.org, ImpeachMcCain.net) Charles Wallace of Spokane, WA (ImpeachKucinich.com, ImpeachEdwards.us) and Barney Schlacks of St. Louis, MO (ImpeachRomney.net, ImpeachGiuliani.net).
• None of the sites are earnestly in opposition to the candidates named, most of the domains lead to parked pages with ad links and some don’t load at all, but there are some unusual ones.
• ImpeachClark.com, oddly enough, leads to Hated.com, which seems like the political version of a parked domain — it’s a guide to a number of popular liberal sites such as BartCop and Raw Story, but only links one true blog: Bill Scher’s Liberal Oasis.
• ImpeachMcCain.com features apparently-original text previewing McCain’s ‘08 bid, and almost feels like a tribute site — with a photo gallery! — but also features conspicuous Adsense and makes sure to quote McCain’s infamous Chelsea Clinton joke.
• ImpeachGingrich.com and .net both redirect to AboutEating.com, the website of a culinary celebrity in Wall’s hometown of Cincinnati.

And that’s about all I found. If I’ve missed anything important, let’s hear it in the comments.

A few minutes ago, the MSNBC chyron announced that Gingrich won’t decide on a presidential run until next September. The sound was off and they’ve moved on to other segments, but I believe they’re referring to this report by James Pindell:

Gingrich said he is more concerned with injecting ideas into the campaign than himself. Monday night at a First Amendment dinner in Manchester and again Tuesday morning he said he will not consider running for president until September 2007, a relatively late date.

The third quarter of 2007 is way too late to start playing the staffing game — by that point every other candidate will have already signed up the top rung of advisers. That’s not to say a candidate couldn’t get in late and still succeed; if Wes Clark had been a better candidate, he might have pulled that off. But it’s not clear Gingrich is this kind of candidate, either. If Gingrich is waiting that long, then he’s not seriously thinking of running for president. Worse, he doesn’t even realize he should be making people think that he actually is.

This must come as a disappointment to the thousands of conservative blog readers who made him their top choice in the latest GOP Bloggers straw poll, but it couldn’t have come as much of a surprise. Like the liberal bloggers for whom Russ Feingold was a runaway straw poll favorite but would probably have ended up supporting Hillary (not likely) or Edwards (more likely) even if Feingold hadn’t dropped out, by September of next year conservative bloggers will likewise be deciding to reluctantly support McCain (see: Hillary), Romney (see: Edwards), or Rudy Giuliani (it depends), regardless of what Gingrich does.

Gingrich’s candidacy — in the works at least since Mr. Clinton’s Wild Plane Ride — has always been premised on the idea of promoting conservative ideas within the context of the election, not on actually winning electoral office. Issue candidates are a time-honored part of presidential politics, so this is not duplicitous in of itself.

But issue-based candidacies only work if you actually make moves like you’re going to run — see Dennis Kucinich in the last cycle, who ran a threadbare but earnest campaign through 2003, or Duncan Hunter (who has already announced that he will run) on the GOP side this time. But Gingrich won’t even think about putting a team together until nearly a year from now, which at that point will be less than six months from the Iowa caucuses.

Running a credible presidential campaign is about creating a presence — momentum, or the appearance thereof. Newt Gingrich, needless to say, will not be creating any of this. If Gingrich won’t even bluff, the media won’t play along.

Update: Via Political Wire, the suspicion that Hillary Clinton might not run for president gets a boost from a QC Times report saying Clinton isn’t staffing up in Iowa. If true, then this wide-open free-for-all nomination race only continues to thin out.