Twitter as an Impressive New Center for Activism

Twitter as an Impressive New Center for Activism. Many people are now aware of the website Twitter, and it's developing popularity as a means of broadcasting your thoughts and keeping in touch with the world around you. Really anything can be discussed or shared, simply through the exchange of concise status messages posted to your blog.

Twitter allows us to keep in touch in the kind of clear, open way that has never been thoroughly possible in the past, and best of all it allows us to do all of this on the move.

As an example of a popular, personal Twitter blog, here is Stephen Fry's: http://www.twitter.com/stephenfry

Not only is he using the site to communicate thoughts about his own life, thoughts and activities, but he can stay in contact with other people, meet new people, exchange messages... you can even follow somebody's Twitter blog without them necessarily having to follow yours, really giving it aspects of a news "feed". As well as this, people can be blocked from your blog, and Twitter blogs can be switched to private, but I find the structure is so loose and flexible that really anything can be made out of it.

I myself am following around 89 blogs and am being followed by around 75, and these are not necessarily the same ones.

Companies such as http://www.twitter.com/SEGA , organizations such as http://www.twitter.com/greenpeace , charities such as http://www.twitter.com/oxfam ... ANYONE can use the site for nearly anything :)

Which now brings me to the main focus of this article. To me, one of the most essential things in the world and in organized society is the strength of the individual to stand up, and express their opinion. Whatever that opinion might be. The strength of the individual and the collective is absolutely unbelievable, and no government regardless of how oppressive can subdue the sheer number, and the will, of it's population. In my mind, it is this free speech and cohesion of people to form groups, protest, set up peace camps, sign petitions, engage in benevolent activities or workshops and many other things that makes up one of the most key parts of democracy and a good political and social system.

So, how can Twitter as a system of exchanging and broadcasting messages be utilized to help this cause? CAN it be utilized?

In truth, it already has. A relatively large number of charities, activist groups and non-profit organizations have taken to using Twitter as a cost-free way of voicing their cause and keep people informed, and I discovered when searching that there were a very large number available for me to follow from my own personal blog. I did however feel that there was one quite considerable thing that didn't seem to exist, something which I decided I would just create myself!

Even though there are some blogs which include the occasional upcoming protest or event sometimes, it did seem to me that there was no individual place I could "follow" on Twitter or subscribe to as an RSS (news) feed that would keep me updated with all the latest events in my area, so I could have a look at it at my computer or ideally for me on the go and decide which ones I want to go to!

So I thought I would build it myself with my friends, and the outcome is this community-updated website, which fully works but we are still hard at work on: http://www.twitteractivism.com

Basically, the principal idea with the site was to be as closely linked with Twitter and the relevant blogs as possible, allowing anyone to follow them and post to them either from within Twitter itself or within the site. ANYONE can post events and entries to the blogs, and there are ones for all different countries. So far they cover the US, the UK and Canada, with one extra one for worldwide causes and things that affect all of us. I will be creating lots more in future however, depending on what people ask for (feedback can be submitted to my email address from the site) and how popular the current blogs are!

I really hope that this can kind of, work with the activist scene a bit and give people the ability to share news of upcoming events and anything connected that they want to with increased ease than maybe even ever before!

Ok, well that's basically all I would like to say about Twitter, the activism presence on there and my little project.. I am really hoping that it increases in size to be something really good, as I do have faith in it as an idea :) Please click some of the links and check it out - let me know what you think!

Thanks for reading this, and hope you have good fun with Twitter if you decide to check it out or use it more!

Mike, TwitterActivism.com!. Article Source: http://arsharing.com

Article title: Twitter as an Impressive New Center for Activism By: Hoppimike

Please click the link to my my new activism website which works with Twitter - here is the url: www.twitteractivism.com And again are a couple of the blogs: www.twitter.com/dcactivism www.twitter.com/GlobalActivism Mike :)