Twitter Expert

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.

How does Twitter help?

Twittering the Conference

Let me briefly explain how it was possible to track the conferences on Twitter. At its simplest, individuals can send out short messages from computers or phones giving a blow-by-blow account.

More interestingly, it is possible to use a “hashtag“, which is like a Technorati Tag for short messages, to group all the messages on a topic together. Another comparison that some people will recognise is with IRC (Internet Relay Chat) Topic Channels. The new feature with Twitter is that these hashtags can be created spontaneously by Twitter users, which gives an enormous flexibility. Beyond that, there are various web services which list current popular topics as “Tag Clouds” or league tables, or which display a scrolling list of all messages containing any hashtag you choose.

In the case of the Convention on Modern Liberty, the hashtag turned out to be #modernliberty or #coml, and for the Labour 20 conference it was #labour20.

At the time of writing there are still follow-up conversations happening on #coml and #labour20, which are worth a look.

Finding the Messages with a Hashtag

The simplest way is a straightforward search on (say) #modernliberty on the Twitter website. I used a service from Monitter (click on the picture for a full screenshot):

A more sophisticated service is provided by Twitterfall, which has enough options to be daunting for some beginners.

Networked Conversational Politics

These services allow topic-based conversations to be picked out of the mass of Twitter messages, which allows reporting and debate among disparate groups of people from anywhere. In one sense, this is a more immediately interactive version of the conversation which is made possible by blog comments and links between blog articles.

Different elements of the conversation have been possible before, for example in chatrooms or on Instant Messaging services such as Googlechat. The main differences I see with Twitter are that the service incorporates the key elements of blog conversations, but in a quicker form.

Further, the flexibility of twitter hashtags and third-party online services make the conversation freewheeling and accessible. I think this has considerable potential in a number of areas of political debate, from Local Councillors communicating with constituents in “Twitter surgeries each Thursday at 7-8pm (for example)”, up to the ability for a wider group of people to follow events. It amounts to another ready-built piece of communications infrastructure that is just waiting for us to use it creatively.

Expect interesting Twitter services at the next set of Party Conferences.

For some time I have been interested in the Concept of “Conversational Politics” which I use, in my own head anyway, as shorthand for politicians coming down from their rostrums to take part in political debate hosted by the electorate - whether on blogs or in any other forum. Twitter seems to offer a powerful example of such a forum, and I would like to hear about any experiments that happen. Let me throw out 2 suggestions:

1. Who’s up for hosting an online political salon on Sunday nights, for one example?
2. Let’s start making a decent go of using #pmq for live commentary on Prime Minister’s Questions.

What did I hear over Twitter?

I was tracking the Twitter debate around the two conferences on a single screen, and there was a sense of two isolated conversations occurring in parallel - even when mischevious people started adding the #labour20 hashtag to Tweets in the #modernliberty topic to add some cross-fertilisation to the debate. That’s fair enough, since they were two isolated conversations. But it will be interesting when related conferences are running, or to watch different areas of the same conference.

What Happens Next

If I put it prosaically, this has the feel of a “culture war”, where the outcome will be decided by which side convinces the Electorate of the accuracy of their case. We have the “Modern Liberty” people all proceeding from the assumption that intrusive laws need to be cut back, while the “what’s the problem, Guv?” people (e.g., Tom Harris) can’t see that there is an issue.

These will be interesting times.

Wrapping Up

Let me repeat my two questions:

1. Who’s up for hosting an online political salon on Sunday nights, for one example?
2. Let’s start making a decent go of using #pmq for live commentary on Prime Minister’s Questions.

I’ll address the actual content of the Modern Liberty Convention tomorrow.

Tags: anthony barnett, coml, convention on modern liberty, conversational politics, derek draper, labour20, modernliberty, tim montgomerie, twitter