McCain and Obama Twitter Up

The Personal Democracy Forum 2008 is sponsoring a "free wheeling debate" on technology and government via Twitter. To borrow a quote from a friend in Houston, this reporter fears for The Republic.

Both camps are not directly offering up their candidates for president. The McCain campaign will be represented by Liz Mair, online communications director of the Republican National Committee while the Obama campaign has Clinton-era tech-wonk Mike Nelson in their corner; Nelson is an outside advisor to the Obama campaign on technology, media and telecommunications.

The debate is scheduled to start on June 23, in conjunction with next week's Personal Democracy Forum conference in NYC. Moderator is Time magazine blogger Ana Maria Cox.  Each day, Cox will "tweet" a question or two and the two campaign representatives will twit, er tweet back their answers. There is no set work on answers; parties may choose to either link out to a URL or post multiple tweets to answer a question. The moderator chooses when a topic is "done" and also whether to pull in comments or queries from other Twitters who are following along.

Closure of the debate may occur as early as Tuesday or go longer depending on the endurance of Cox, Nelson, and Mair.

For more
- Read PDF's Twitter Debate Statement [1]

Related articles:
Telecom execs don't have a read [2] on McCain, Obama
SPOTLIGHT: Obama's ex-FCC Backers [3]