Goodbye Olympics, Hello Conventions

I followed two twitter bots during the Olympics, 08olympics and twittolympic. They were both great and I want to thank the people who put them together and operated them. I got more olympics news from these two bots than any other source. It helped me keep connected to the olympics while I was traveling and away from the TV. And it made the TV watching even better when I was able to do that.

I’ve stopped following these bots now that the Olympics is over and now I want to turn my attention to the two conventions, the Democrats this week and the Republicans next week.

Can anyone recommend good twitter bots to follow the convention news? I don’t want individual twitters, I want bots that aggregate the best links and tweets. Please leave your suggestions in the comments and I’ll reblog the best suggestions (gotta love reblogging comments!).

UPDATE: I am still searching for some good bots to follow, but this HuffPo twitter account seems like it’s going to be good. I’m following it now.

2nd UPDATE: Added rss_democrats and rss_republicans. Two more twitter bots to follow. And I stopped following the HuffPo twitter account on my mobile. It was a firehose.

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Comments (Archived):

  1. Austin Bryan

    Hey Fred,My company (New Media Strategies) has partnered with C-SPAN to create a Convention Hub, comprised of two websites, designed to track coverage of the political blogosphere and social media, while making embeddable C-SPAN convention video available for online use. Per your request, it features real-time feeds from Twitter users using the hash-tags #RNC08 and #DNC08. You can find the DNC and RNC sites at http://dnc08.c-span.org/ and http://rnc08.c-span.org/ respectively.Arrington actually wrote about the Hub last week and said “It may have the most up to date news on the conventions.” http://www.techcrunch.com/2…- AB

    1. fredwilson

      AB – i went to those links and could not find a twitter account to follow. can you point me in the right direction?

      1. Austin Bryan

        Sure, on the landing pages, the tweets are displayed one at a time in a “Twitter Roundup” widget on the right side of the page, above the “National Blog Headlines.” You can also find tweets for both conventions aggregated on this one page: http://dnc08.c-span.org/?pa

        1. fredwilson

          right, but is there a twitter bot you are republishing all those tweets to?

          1. Austin Bryan

            Not officially. I tried to set something up with Twitterfeed earlier but was less than pleased with the results. I’ll take another swing at it tonight, though it looks like Georges may have beat me to it.

          2. @georgesdlvb

            In fact, @RSS_Republicans and @RSS_Democrats are now live on Twitter, pushing news from those two web sites you made, and re-tweeting every tweet tagged respectively with #rnc08 and #dnc08. That makes quiet talkative twitters, and I may have to split them in the future…

  2. kidmercury

    what good is a twitterbot when everyone on twitter is afraid to tell the truth? there are some real journalists on justin.tv giving live video coverage. definitely worth checking out: http://www.justin.tv/alexjo

  3. Arturo Servin

    Thanks Fred about twittolympic. It was something that came up with your chat in Leeds and I am glad that even it was very basic it was useful for you. As result of this I am planning to extend its capabilities for the 2010 to make it better (It had a lot of areas of improvement). But the more valuable lesson that let me is that twitter can be used very well for a lot of purposes and well, I have some ideas that hopefully will see the light some day.

    1. fredwilson

      arturo, it’s you i should thank for a very valuable service

  4. Domino

    Check out http://samepoint.com/?q=Dem…, it’s an addictive site. I spent most of my day just looking at what people are talking about on the web. It’s in beta, and I recently notice the developers are also working on RSS feeds aggregation.

  5. DNCbot

    If you send a tweet to @DNCbot or @RNCbot, these are configured to be similar to the bots you are used to Fred. Simply send an @ tweet to them, and it will repost the message. This way if you can’t get to Bryan’s site using hash tags, hopefully a conversation can form on this twitter bot and you can follow it on the go.

  6. @georgesdlvb

    Hi Fred,I’d be happy to set those up on TwitRSS, but I need to be pointed to the sources.As you know, being in France I can take care of the technical side of your need but I don’t have a profound enough knowlegde of the US politics for picking the right source(s).Any RSS feed will do, be it a twitter, a blog, an e-newspaper…Let me know,G

  7. Gabriel Nijmeh

    Hey Fred,Glad you enjoyed 08olympics. It was fun putting together what I felt were some of the better feeds/live bloggers out there, and even better was the fact that others, like yourself, found them to be so useful.Just like summer, I can’t believe the Olympics are over! Looking forward to Vancouver 2010!Thanks!Gabriel

  8. charlie crystle

    Trippi (dean’s campaign manager, Edwards media guy)http://twitter.com/JoeTrippi

  9. kenberger

    Judging by the robotic chants of “USA, USA” at rnc08 last night, it seems many people can’t tell the difference between the 2 events in this post’s title.