Today, I launched a new political mini-site at IggyFacts.ca.
The site is meant to be a humourous take on the definition campaign of the Leader of the Opposition and of the Liberal Party, Michael Ignatieff.
The site is meant to be integrated with, but does not require, Twitter. Random facts about Michael Ignatieff are presented and with a single click of a button, they can be “re-tweeted” (repeated) via a person’s twitter account. You can even submit your own facts.
Twitter + Politics + Crowdsourcing = IggyFacts.ca
For those that aren’t familiar with Twitter, the service is like building your own mailing list. People sign up to receive information from you at your discretion. For example, at the time of this writing, I have 3,846 people “following” me on Twitter. This means that several times a day, almost 4,000 people read my updates on a variety of topics from politics, what I’m thinking or even doing (or whatever else I’d like to write). The political implications of this are large because each one of these people have their own “following” (or list) and this presents the opportunity to spread a message. Some people that follow me are web designers, some are Democrats, some Republican, some Conservative, some Liberal, some Calgarian, some Australian, among others. A police officer that follows me on Twitter may find a message that I write interesting enough to re-tweet (or repeat) it along to his list of his police officer friends, his Vancouver motocycle club twitterers and even his fellow jetskiers on Twitter. In turn they may pass the message along too. This bridges groups and it can find a message going out beyond one particular community. Blogs are often read by die-hard partisans and not often by swing voters. Since Twitter allows you to read beyond the highly integrated political blog community, it is a powerful tool for politics.