Who?

With all due respect to Ms. Malin, it does catch the eye to wander down the Top Conservatives on Twitter leaderboard -- a ranking, for better or worse, of those right-leaning folks on Twitter -- and see the name Nansen Malin in slot number four, just below the somewhat more household names like former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and national media personality Glenn Beck. Let's set aside for a minute the perfectly deserved qualms about devoting all that much attention to Twitter metrics. You just have to wonder, who is Nansen Malin? Well, we asked her. The basics: she lives in Sea View, Washington and serves as the Pacific County chairperson on the Washington State Republican Party. Beyond that, she was kind enough to share over email her reflections on how she has been able to find herself in such company and with a sliver of brain space of more than 144,000 people.

First, Malin on how it all began...

One of the great things about Twitter, and its API, is that it promotes the rapid development of innovative applications on top of it. For example, Twitpay was created over the course of a weekend. At a recent Ruby on Rails conference, a full-blown Twitter-based application was live-coded over the course of one freakin’ hour.

So Twitter isn’t just a great tool, it’s a great platform to build on. Now, we all know for a fact that conservatives dominate Twitter (and that the Left should be nervous). But so far, all the Right has built on top of Twitter is a lame leaderboard. And attempts to mirror ActBlue have not been successful.

Because I just can’t stand to see a good idea go unimplemented, I’d like to share with you a step-by-step description of how a Twitter political fundraising engine could be built, and how much it would cost. Let’s call it Conservatwiv. SPOILER ALERT: It would be really easy, and relatively inexpensive.

Barely containing his glee, Talking Points Memo's Brian Beutler reports on the rift that has developed between the two co-founders of the Top Conservatives on Twitter, or #TCOT, movement. Michael Patrick Leahy and Rob Neppell (perhaps better known online as N.Z. Bear) are bickering over control of the...well, what exactly? It seems that Leahy and Neppell have been unable to develop a good working relationship over the details of their parts of the #TCOT project. In particular, the sticking point seems to be a handful of websites built around the Top Conservatives on Twitter theme.

The story has evolved since Beutler last checked in...

At a Politics Online session this afternoon on the future of the online political right, conservative new media guy Justin Hart ("Tweet for Chuck") walked the audience through his evolutionary view of the right's approach to Twitter. Interesting stuff. On the topic of Top Conservatives on Twitter, a.k.a. #TCOT, Hart said that part of the appeal was the thrill of head-to-head competition. To make it on the top of the #TCOT leaderboard, conservatives had to ascend to the uppermost ranks of Twitter in terms of the number of followers. The liberal view of the world, said Hart with half a chuckle, might see it that everyone on Twitter should have the same number of followers. Not so on the political right. "The conservative point of view is that self interest and self-aggrandizement is part of human nature," he said. So the idea of competing to amass Twitter followers, said Hart, seems entirely like the natural order of things.

(I'm throwing this here because it's too good to let pass. The Next Right's Jon Henke on getting past Reagan worship: "Republicans say 'Reagan' like smurfs say smurf.'" Classic.)