There was a time when Barack Obama was the number one most followed personage on Twitter, back during the campaign season, but after getting elected his staff seemingly let the account go fallow, to be overtaken by celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Ellen Degeneres.

For some time now, we've been hearing that conservatives dominate the usage of Twitter when it comes to online politics, and the appearance of TweetProgress, a new aggregator for progressive twitterers, only appears to be reinforcing that notion. For example, today The Hill's story on this topic notes that "many more conservatives use #TCOT than liberals use #p2," citing the leading hashtags employed by conservative and liberals, respectively, on the messaging platform. David All, a leading conservative consultant who has written a popular guide for rightwingers using the site (and a techPresident contributing blogger) was on Twitter today pointing out that there were 3,911 uses of the #TCOT hashtag today alone, compared to just 2,396 of #p2, and "almost all" of the former were "conservative/on-message" while the latter were a "mix of libs/cons/media" posting.

Leaving aside how David managed to sift through and characterize more than 6,000 individual tweets (yes, he's energetic, but that energetic?), I'm not convinced that this is the most salient metric for judging which side is more dominant on Twitter. For one thing, it wouldn't be hard for an intern (or a bot) to simply re-tweet every tweet that appears with #tcot in its text for anyone to artificially inflate the hashtag's usage numbers. David notes that over the course of one week's analysis, he found 5,500 unique users who employed #tcot, which may be a more telling sign of how well the Right is using the platform, but I think this is still oversimplifying the question.

Are conservatives out-organizing progressives on Twitter, as a recent story on CNN reported? And does their seeming dominance matter?

For online activists in America, these are hard questions to answer, not least because a) "organizing on Twitter" is still (and may always be) a very loose process; b) usage of popular hashtags like #tcot ("top conservatives on Twitter," launched November 28, 2008) or #p2 ("progressives 2.0, launched in response February 13, 2009") is an imperfect measure of strength; c) judging by top follower numbers, Twitter's audience appears to lean liberal (more on that in a separate post); and d) we're still figuring out what Twitter is, and isn't, good for in terms of political battles (i.e. it's clearly good for rapid-response message wars, but not [yet?] good for raising money, judging from the closure of TipJoy, for example).