Scenarios for #topprog: your thoughts?

twitter logoLast night’s #topprog Tweetup, discussing the next steps for the new progressive Twitter hashtag, had some excellent discussions.   Chris Cardinal (aka @cacardinal) has set up a skeleton web page on topprog.org and did a great job facilitating the tweetup; he’ll be writing up a summary later today.   Somehow, though, I wound up with an action item — writing up a couple of quick scenarios for ways to use #topprog.   How’d that happen?!?!?  Looks like my meeting skills are rusty!

Still it’s a good thing to focus on.  Twitter hashtags are extremely flexible, and there are zillions of things we could do with them.  What are some of the sweet spots?  And how do we use #topprog to accomplish them?

I’ll kick things off with a couple that seem important: action alerts and events.  Suggestions and feedback  are very welcome: in the comments here, or tweeted to #topprog if it’s 140 characters or less 🙂

Action alerts

For example,*

call your Senators about the stimulus! @ 1-866-544-7573 http://tinyurl.com/cd582s #action #topprog

This is something we discussed during the tweetup: include the #action tag to highlight that it’s an action alert.

Doing a Twitter search for “#topprog #action” gives all the action alerts.  With a little programming, we can probably set up a widget for topprog.org (and anybody else who wants it) that sorts action alerts by how many times they’re Tweeted.

Events

Twitter’s a good broadcast mechanism for in-person as well as virtual events.  Here’s a couple of examples from this morning:

RT @jwjnational: in DC workers & electeds talk about #employeefreechoice. 12:30pm at Upper Senate Park #event #topprog

GetFISARight conference call Saturday 2/7 2 pm Pacific/5 p.m Eastern, agenda and dialin info at http://tinyurl.com/ccxedh #topprog #tcot #event

If we can come up with conventions on how to specify date and time, it should be easy to display the #topprog #event feed in a calendar form — which’d be kinda cool.

Note that I’m not suggesting that we build a separate event mechanism for RSVPs etc.  Between Facebook, evite, MySpace, MyBO, and so on, there are already more than enough of those! I think of Twitter as a broadcast mechanism that can get the word out about events — like the events on Facebook and MyBO for the Get FISA Right conference call.

And …

Several other interesting scenarios came up in the tweetup yesterday: voting (perhaps using Plodt),  discussing talking ponts and messaging.  Talking with Maegan Carberry and Teresa Valdez-Klein on Wilshire and Washington earlier today, Chris Cardinal mentioned another important one: getting the word out about posts progressives might be interested in digging.  I’m sure there are a lot of others too.

Your thoughts on which are the best places to start — and how to accomplish them?  Please discuss!

jon

* The link goes to Peter Rothberg’s The Right is Winning Today in The Nation, which gives context and talking points.