I'm making some tweaks to my Directory of Canadian Political Twits. (Twits, by the way, is used here as a term of affection mostly because using the word Twitterers or Tweeters sounds odd.) Some notes and explanations about this directory:
- This directory does not exist in a vacuum. There are lots of great resources for those interested in Twitter and politics and media. One great example of another directory is Politwitter.ca. It aims to be a comprehensive directory and wonderful stats compiler for the whole intersection of media, politicians, political bloggers. It also includes provincial and municipal politics. My directory is more of a niche directory with a focus almost exclusively on the Parliamentary Precinct. And, to focus it even more tightly, it is not intended to be a directory for people who tweet, blog or write about Parliament Hill but rather a directory of people who tweet, blog or write from Parliament Hill. It's a directory of federal political staffers; federal government departments; foreign embassies and a guide to hashtags used by those who generated twitter feeds from Parliament Hill. This focus will be useful to some (mostly me, as the creator of it) and, I hope, to others. Other directories will be useful in different ways to others.
- Anyone's free to “declare” a hashtag and it's up to the Twitterverse to accept it or not. So please keep that in mind when I start talking here about committee hashtags. If you think I'm for the birds here, fine: Tweet your own tags. When I first declared hashtags for House of Commons committees, I simply put the # in front of the four character short form given to each committee by the House of Commons itself. But then I searched to see if, for example, the hashtag #INDU, for example, was in wide use and, as it was in wide use for some other subject, I thought I'd just stick a C in front of the four-character shortform to make it unique and so I dubbed INDU #CINDU. I now think the concern about the hashtag being unique to the committee is overblow, so I'm dropping the C and I'm going back to #INDU. If you're using an RSS feed, a Twitter list, or other method to keep track of these committee hashtags, I don't think there'll be a lot of confusion.
- Adding a few hashtags (a bit late, but better late than never) including #jaffer, #guergis and #LPCX. Suggestions for others?
- Reorganized and made lots of edits to the Hashtags and Organizations page
- Added a Twitter list I've created for “hopeful” MPs, i.e. a list of twits who are official candidates for the next general election. I'm open to putting more Twitter lists up here. Do you have some lists to share? Let me know.