It’s Temporary
UPDATE
It’s happened before we planned, but TweetProgress.us is up. We will be adding features (and an actual design) over the next few days, but what can you do? Progressives are enterprising folks and started spreading the word about TweetProgress.us before it was officially launched. Read the post below to get a better idea of why creating TweetProgress was a priority for the progressive movement.
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As soon as I said the words out loud to CNN’s Eric Kuhn, I knew I was going to have to take some heat.
“Twitter is a news funnel,” she said. “Conservatives are very tightly knit and getting their message out very well.”
it’s not so much that quote that is problematic, it’s the over all message in the blog post: “Liberal bloggers admit conservatives have upper hand on Twitter.”
But progressives have got to start somewhere and starting with the facts is as good a place as any. When you look at the hashtags conservatives and progressives use on Twitter the story becomes more clear. The conservative hashtag #TCOT (Top Conservatives on Twitter) is used at about an average of 2,000 times per day while #p2 (progressives 2.0) is used about 400 times per day (very rough estimates).
That a tag is used more often than another only means just that. But those numbers do mean something–something that becomes more clear when you look at this visualization sent to me by Jim Gilliam, creator of WhiteHouse2.org, Nationbuilder, and the Twitter petition site act.ly). It comes from a blog post on ReadWriteWeb about Twitter use during the Iran election: “Evolution of a Revolution: Visualizing Millions of Iran Tweets” by Kovas Boguta.
TCOT on Twitter
If you look closely at visualization you will see the dense cluster of blue communication points on the right that reflects #TCOT use on Twitter, or as Boguta describes it: “tightly interwoven conservative twittersphere.” No where on that visualization do you see progressives and that should be troubling to progressive activists.
Of course, isn’t just about numbers or sides, it’s about influence and some of the things you can do on Twitter–influence the media for instance. Drafting more progressives into an existing infrastructure will be the key to more successful actions and issue campaigns. Plans are in motion to do just that so keep any eye out for more developments.
The message I want everyone to come away with after reading this post is that conservatives may be using their hashtag more often than progressives but that doesnt mean they are out organizing progressives online. In fact, progressives still do a better job pushing issues through blogs and progressive advocacy groups are using Twitter in all kinds of innovative ways.
Twitter is not the be all end all of online activism but it is an online platform progressives need to make sure we own in the very near future.
Similar Posts:
- TweetProgress: Building Progressive Infrastructure on Twitter
- #Digg it! A proposal for women of color, feminists, and progressives on Twitter
- #taxcuts: Creating Twitter Hashtags That Inspire Action
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Trackbacks & Pingbacks
[...] Tracy Viselli over at Reno and Its Discontents blog has been comparing conservative vs. progressive use and density on Twitter. She writes: When you look at the hashtags conservatives and progressives use on Twitter the conservative hashtag #TCOT (Top Conservatives on Twitter) is used at about an average of 2,000 times per day while #p2 (progressives 2.0) is used about 400 times per day (very rough estimates). That a tag is used more often than another only means just that. But those numbers do mean something–something that becomes more clear when you look at this visualization sent to me by Jim Gilliam, creator of WhiteHouse2.org, Nationbuilder, and the Twitter petition site act.ly). [...]
[...] the Folks at TweetProgress decided to fix it. Tracy – aka @myrnatheminx – was the co-founder (along with Jon Pincus) of the hashtag #p2 which basically stands for [...]
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Iran Election: It’s Temporary | Reno and Its Discontents [link to post]
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Twitter Comment
It’s Temporary | Reno and Its Discontents [link to post]
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As Jim Gilliam said on an email thread, there are worse problems to ahve than going viral before the anticipated launch date.
Very exciting — thanks for working with Jim and taking the lead on getting this to happen!
jon
Twitter Comment
Interesting article about conservatives #tcot and progressives #p2 on twitter (US) [link to post]
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RT @SuButcher: Interesting article about conservatives #tcot and progressives #p2 on twitter (US) [link to post]
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