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).

Is Twitter the great leveler? Maybe. In real life, Newt Gingrich is the former Speaker of the House and, it's probably fair to say, in most observers' top five list of the most highly-regarded conservative thinkers in America today. Then there's Michael Patrick Leahy, a guy who had a clever idea, who turned Top Conservatives on Twitter from a simple hashtag (#tcot) to a meme with real legs. Leahy's been on the front lines of what's arguably been the conservative domination of Twitter.

Yesterday, Leahy invited Gingrich to teach a class on American exceptionalism at his TCOT University. Gingrich is a Twitter newbie who's quickly racking up followers (though he trails Leahy at about 2,000 to his 6,600). And he isn't above asking for a little educational help from the wired Republican new guard. His tweet in response to Leahy revealed a humility that will serve him well in Twitterland: "what does it mean?#tcot."

It sounds to me like it should be the name of a third-party candidate in that Kodos and Kang election episode of The Simpsons, but "topprog" is actually a new political Twitter hashtag that is starting to find traction. I've been beating the drum for a short while now on the fact that conservatives are organizing better and faster than the left on Twitter, as evidenced by Top Conservatives on Twitter/#tcot -- which is, of course, the model for this "Top Progressives" project. (For what it's worth, one prominent conservative I spoke with recently pronounced it "tee-cot." Now you know.)

Republican State Assemblyman Chuck Devore of California is the subject of compelling online experiment as he attempts to unseat sitting Senator Barbara Boxer -- a Twitter-based fundraising drive, under the banner of #TCOT (that is, Top Conservatives on Twitter)...he President-elect's weekly YouTube'd appeals to the American public aren't as popular as they once were...Resolved: Appending "2.0" to anything is incredibly dorky...and much more.