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...

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.

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.)