The net's pipe to the convention 

There were so many ideas about Twitter and its role during the Democratic National Convention on the NewsGang podcast yesterday that I hope the little NewsGang subculture doesn't flit off to the next new thing and neglect to follow up. Don't you think that's one of the big dangers of info overload -- that you start assigning too much value to the new, and never get around to lingering over and building on the consequential?

Listen to it and craft your own ideas about the ripples. Let me focus on just a couple parts of it.

1. Doing something. The NewsGang tribe (meaning members of the growing podcast-Twitter-newsreader admixture) can do more than comment on the election, although even commentary can push along an agenda, I realize.

When Steve mentioned that a number of superdelegates already use Twitter, it made me want to search on their names and create a new Twitter account that follows them all. It would be a big job for one person, but NewsGangers could divvy up the labor, and maybe contribute the work to the Sourcewatch Superdelegate Transparency Project.

A volunteer programmer might look at who the supers are following on Twitter and put in some filters that would yield some interesting convergences. Applying something like Facebook's Friend Wheel visualizer to the data would be nothing short of fascinating.

2. No closed doors. The most exciting part of following the convention on Twitter will be the real-time unfiltered reporting and commentary. The backchannel -- and the in-person circles of connections radiating out from it -- can influence the event while it's happening. The maneuvering will be all out in the open, making a rapid feedback loop. Old-school party tricks can be foiled in the sunlight before deals are done. Happy thought indeed.

More on not flitting off to the next new thing 

A year and a half ago or so I spent a little time working on a space using Moodle, the open source LMS, where conference-goers and remote particpants could go deeper into certain topics after the conferences end. Don't you think it should bother us more that we don't take the time to dwell on the important stuff, but get distracted by the next shiny object? It makes me feel shallow when I know I'm doing that, but it's so hard to balance the desire to dig down with the fear of missing the latest developments. Ironically I tabled the experiment, finding new things to be interested in. ;-)