Twitter Expert

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This is the first of two or three posts responding to the Convention on Modern Liberty.

Rather than going down to London, I stayed at home working and followed the stream of messages from the conference and external observers. This first piece highlights new insights from watching the conference alongside the “Labour 2.0” online campaigning conference held in London on the same day via the comment streams on Twitter and video.

But I start with a description of the mechanisms and services that I used to follow the conversation from the East Midlands, and a few thoughts about their importance.

Derek Draper has been building up a large following on Twitter for Labour List, by following all the followers of other bloggers. It happened to Iain Dale, and yesterday I started getting reports that it is happening to me.

You can see the lunge on the graph of follower growth innthe main article when they said “Right boys, let’s do Twitter now“.

I’d like to educate the New Labour strategists that conversational politics is not about great lunges for growth as if you were some sort of cosmic Musketeer, but rather about listening carefully first.

The current figures for @derekdraper are following 2035, and being followed by 1905.

The way Twitter works when you hit 2000 is that you can only follow an extra 10% on top of the people who have followed you back. This is why people with large followings usually have a balance between the two figures.

So if a lot of us unfollow Dolly that will therefore bring the aggressive growth strategy to a dead stop - or at least until he has unfollowed us in return and found another few hundred more amenable people to grow the Labour List Twitter empire.

If you want to continue following the Labourlist Twitter Feed after unfollowing Dolly, you can do it by reading the RSS feed for @derekdraper.

I sure hope that UNITE or whoever is funding those interns has RSI insurance in place and pays overtime.

This item was first posted on the Wardman Wire.