Follow US political activity online – over 130 federal members on Twitter
I’ve previously discussed how actively the US has taken up Twitter as a communications tool in government circles – as have the UK, Canada, Israel and several other countries.
Looking at the website Who Politicians Tweet, there are now more than 130 US Federal politicians using Twitter, or around 24% of all 535 elected members (Reps 435, Senate 100).
In Australia I can only find twelve Federal members using Twitter, or about 5% of the combined 226 elected members (Reps 150, Senate 76).
However more Australian councils are adopting the service – with more than 20 now actively using Twitter, up from only three a few months ago.
You can see a full list of Aussie politicians and political parties on Twitter at Oz Pollie Tweeters.
From my commercial experience I have normally considered Australia as running about two years behind the US for the online channel. I am curiously watching to see if this also holds true in the public arena.
I agree how Australia is behind the US with online adoption and tech. At tweetmp (http://tweetmp.org.au), we are trying to get Australian MP’s to join twitter. You can invite your local MP to join.
And by the magic of tweetmp’s API (http://tweetmp.org.au/api), http://openaustralia.org now is getting the list of current active parliamentary twitterers and showing a link to their profile. See, for example http://www.openaustralia.org/mp/kevin_rudd
Great job Matthew!