Utah Tech Watch

My Experience with Twitter this Past Saturday (5-10-08) at the Republican State Convention

This past Saturday (5-10-08) found me and 3,500 of my closest friends –  ;-)  — jammed into the McKay Events Center at Utah Valley State College as participants in the Republican Party’s state convention.

This was my first time to attend such an event, let alone my first participation as a state delegate.

Although the doors opened around 7 a.m., I arrived close to 10, after spending several hours in the morning working on a new business proposal. And then for the next seven hours, I was swept up in the festivities of the Grand Old Party.

Shortly after arriving, I ran into long-time friend and associate, Phil Windley, former Chief Information Officer for the State of Utah. As a delegate for many years, he offered me some good advice and perspective on what to expect throughout the day. He also mentioned he’d enjoyed following my micro-posts on Twitter (known to those of us using the microblogging service as “tweets”).

This comment was enough to remind me that I had the ability to microblog on-the-fly from the convention and provide a running commentary (as it were) from my perspective should anyone be interested. So that’s what I did, at least as best as I could.

    

What is Twitter?

For those of you not familiar with the service, Twitter is a free online Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that makes it possible for anyone with a mobile phone or personal computer to write and publish short items of 140 characters or less onto the World Wide Web.

These incredibly short posts (or “tweets” as they’re sometimes known) are hosted on Twitter.com, but can also be forwarded to one’s own Website or blog for re-posting. (I have not done this yet, but expect to do so in the next couple of weeks.) And anyone who is a Twitter subscriber can sign-up to “follow” or track the online tweets (or microblog posts) of other Twitterians.

Some long-time Twitter users and/or highly influential high-tech mavens are being followed by literally thousands of people. Others are viewing Twitter much like the early gold rush days of MySpace and Facebook and seem to be trapped in a race to see who can build the greatest list of people they follow, as well as building up the number of individuals following them.

Me? I’ve been using Twitter for about two months now, and as of this moment I have 35 followers, while I’m following 32 people.

Among those I’m following (in no particular order) are Windley, Scott Lemon, Steve Spencer, Cyndi Tetro, Russ Page, Jason Alba, and Kris Beldin, just to name a few.

Some people (like Alba) tweet ALL THE TIME, and yes, at times it can be a bit overwhelming. Others tweet from time to time (like Tetro). And still others seem to fluctuate in their frequency and intensity in their microblog posts (like me).

For me, I’ve decided to use Twitter primarily as a professional service. So although I have occassionally posted personal items through Twitter, these have been few, a trend I plan to continue into the future.

For anyone looking for a way to create blog posts from anywhere with a cell phone, Twitter is a good, quick alternative, even if you’ll be greatly limited by the 140-character space limit per tweet.

That said, it is not uncommon to find people produce back-to-back-to-back posts with Twitter to create a stream-of-consciousness-like flow of microblog posts one after the other to begin to approximate a traditional blog post.

For me, I like Twitter. It’s quite easy to set-up and to use. It’s fairly easy to find people to follow, even if determining who best to follow is a bit more complicated.

For these reasons and more, I recommend getting on the Twitter bandwagon. And if you’re interested, my Twitter user name is dpolitis.

Now back to my thoughts on microblogging from the Republican State Convention.

    

More Thoughts on the Convention

All told, I ended up writing/posting 23 different tweets from the state convention.

For those of you keeping score, it looks like Windley created 14 Twitter posts during the convention.

That said, Phil brought his laptop to the convention, which apparently allowed him to tweet on-the-fly and write a very detailed blog post about the convention on Technometria.com entitled “Final: 2008 Utah State Republican Convention.” I highly recommend it for a blow-by-blow account of the day’s events from very connected political techie.

If you want to know my sense of the convention, your best bet is to go back and ready my tweets on Twitter for May 10.

However, I will confess the following:

I voted for Bill Dew for the Republican nominee for the Second Congressional District to go against incumbent Jim Matheson (D) in the general election this November. Although he’s a newcomer to the political game, I was impressed with Dew’s commitment to put $500,000 of his own money into his campaign.

Part of the reason I voted for Dew versus Merrill Cook in spite of the fact that Cook had two prior terms as U.S. Representative under his belt was that I was not convinced that Cook could unify Republicans within the district behind him. And according to one of my sources, that’s the biggest challenge 2nd District Republicans have had when going up against Matheson and prior Democrats elected in the district — they switch over during the general election.

In addtion, I voted for Gov. Jon M. Huntsman, Jr. for Governor and Mark Walker for State Treasurer. As expected, Huntsman gets a pass directly into the general election, while Walker captured 59 percent of the vote. Not enough for Walker to avoid a primary runoff against Richard Ellis, but enough votes to give him a lot of clout going into the primary this June.

In addition, although I could not vote for incumbent Chris Cannon in his 3rd District race, I support Chris and would have voted for him if I lived in his district.

Like Windley, I too have met and worked with Cannon. And although his interpersonal communication skills could use some polishing, Cannon’s definitely a friend of business (in general) and of the high-tech industry arena specifically.

Rich Nelson from the Utah Technology Council is a big Cannon supporter — I ran into him at the convention — and he pushed me to wear a Cannon button, which I did. Most importantly, Cannon is quite savvy when it comes to technology and tech issues, and he’s a big supporter of Utah’s tech industry.

In the end, Cannon was nearly eliminated at the convention with Jason Chaffetz capturing 59 percent of the delegates’ votes.

I believe this makes three conventions in a row where Cannon has not been able to garner enough support from the delegates, which tend to lean more conservative than Cannon or the party members within the 3rd District. In other words, don’t be completely shocked if Cannon goes on to win the primary election and goes on to win the general election for a 7th term in office.

Finally, congrats to my friends and neighbors, Bruce Hough and Howard Headlee, who were elected during the convention as National Committeeman and Alternate Delegate, respectively. Way to go guys!

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed my participation as a state delegate, and I’m hopeful I can be tapped to serve again in the future.

Next go-round, however, I aim to recruit more individuals from the high-tech industries to get involved in the political process as well, to run for delegate positions (in either of the two parties), and/or elected office, and to push for candidates and legislation that are friendly to the high-tech industries in the state.

Filed under: Events, Government News, Politics, Utah Technology Council, Utah Valley State College