Crash the Conventions

RNC Protesters use twitter and text messaging

August 27th, 2008 | by Crash the Conventions |

Earlier this year the San Fransisco-based Direct Action to Stop the War used Twitter to send out up-to-the-minute reports on protests in downtown. Looks like the RNC protesters and blockaders are following suit and have set up a number of Twitter pages to keep demonstrators in the loop.

So what’s Twitter? It’s shiny Web 2.0 “mico-blogging” tool. It’s got a neat feature where you can subscribe to update using your cell-phone.

The Tin Can Collective is handling communication infrastructure in St Paul. Here’s what they say about subscribing to Twitter:

Subscribing to twitter groups

The easiest way to subscribe to one of the twitter groups is to send a txt message to the number 40404 with the message “follow <group_name>” If this is the first time you have used twitter, the system will respond asking for you to send them a message with your user name. Reply to this message with whatever username you want to use. This will now be your user name if you ever log on to the twitter web site.

Many of the twitter lists don’t have much traffic yet, but they’ll surely be picking up as the RNC gets closer.

Here’s a list of the group setup as of today: