Liminal states

Update: #topprog Tweetup : Tuesday Night 7:30 EST : Subject – topprog.org features, functionality, and community. Please Retweet!  H/T @cacardinal

The new #topprog Twitter hashtag for progressives continues to make progress with a good range of topics and tweeters — including big names like @blogdiva, @PunditMom (who’s moderating a breakout session at fem2pt0 tomorrow), and @JoeTrippi.

The progressive blogosphere’s ignoring it, of course,* but the conservatives of #tcot are nervous enough that they’re already labelling it a #fail, thinking about flooding it, and coming up with euphemisms for trolling.  And in fact @The_Anti_Guru’s “active engagement” probably accounts for over 50% of the traffic, counting replies.  Guy attempts to disrupt and dominate conversation in potentially-woman-friendly-space, film at 11!

Gender issues aside, a lot of people are skeptical whether it’s possible to have meaningful conversations on Twitter.  Won’t the loudest voices drown everybody else out?  The three loudest tweeters yesterday had 46, 30, and 29 tweets yesterday.  As calibration, @drdigipol, aka Alan Rosenblatt, who as the creator of the list presumably has as much to say as anybody else, had 7.   So it’s easy to overlook @lizandra311’s updates on the Rootscamp in Philadelphia, or the occasional posts from @blogdiva, @Heardtfelt, @myrnyatheminx, @GetFISARight and others.

It’s a place where a little functionality would help a lot.  If only each user had a way of ignoring people they thought were trolling and everybody replying to him!  Or wouldn’t it be cool if I had a knob for the RSS feed that said “ignore everybody who posts more than 10 times in a 24-hour period”?   As more political debate discussions happen on Twitter, hopefully Twitter user interfaces will incorporate funcationality like this [in fact for all i know they already do].

In  the meantime, oh well, people will probably learn to ignore @The_Anti_Guru quickly enough.  “Please don’t feed the trolls.”  And with a little practice it’s easy enough to skip over the posts by the loudest posters even using Twitter’s generic search page.  At least for now, with a little practice it’s not too hard to separate out the wheat from the chaff.

And now back to the gender issues.  Thus far, according to Google, there have been four blog posts about the new #topprog Twitter hashtag for progressives.  Here’s what the linking pattern looked like between mine on Liminal States, Nancy Scola’s on techPresident, Stefan Deeran’s in Exception Magazine, and Colin Delany’s on e.politics.

– I didn’t link to anybody

– Nancy linked to me

– Colin linked to Stefan

– Stefan didn’t link to any of us

To be clear: nobody linked to the only woman who posted about #topprog.  See Shelley Powers’ Guys Don’t Link on Burningbird for more discussion of this dynamic.

It’s also interesting to look at who gets quoted in the articles. Nancy quotes @anotherpundit and me; Stefan quotes Alan and Michael (aka Mr. #tcot).  Colin quotes Alan.  I wonder if women have any opinions on this?

Hmm.  These all sound like good topics for fem2pt0.

jon

* on the surface it seems like the kind of thing that should interest “progressive” bloggers, but it’s on a social network site so it might as well not exist