Twitter gives Rudd a taste of real time democracy

This article first appeared in The Age on February 10, 2010
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It was a perfect example of the social web in action: as the Prime Minister fielded questions from 200 young Australians on the ABC's live Q&A program on Monday night, his performance was being critiqued in real time by a horde of viewers using Twitter.

Not all the comments were polite. Or politically informed. Or always relevant to the issue at hand. But democratic discourse is never all of those things all of the time - no matter what the vehicle - so you might say the Twitter conversation was typical of something you'd find anywhere issues are being discussed by a cross-section of the electorate.