Political tweets a growing fad

When Attorney General Jack Conway's daughter was born a couple of weeks ago, he announced it on the social networking tool Twitter.

And when the University of Kentucky basketball team blew a game it should have won last year, Secretary of State Trey Grayson used Twitter to urge a player he blamed for the loss to transfer to another school.

Twitter has become the latest fad in politics, as office-holders and candidates across the country have taken to sending out "tweets" to followers who hang on their every word.

"I think it humanizes us," said Conway, a Democrat running in next year's Senate race who uses his Twitter account to reach out to younger voters. "They're an amazing generation. ... They vote in much higher numbers than my generation did at their age."

Twitter allows people to post short missives that go out to those who choose to "follow" them on the social networking platform. Messages are limited to 140 characters and can be about anything.

Most people have the messages delivered directly to their cell phones so they can always check in and see what others are saying at any time.

Accounts are free and allow anyone from your next-door neighbor to the biggest Hollywood star to opine about life, politics or, often, nonsense.

It has a language all its own -- eliminating extraneous words and letters and substituting longer words with just a few letters. In Twitterese, for instance, the word "you're" becomes "ur."

Politicians in Washington who tweet are so plentiful that The Hill, a Washington-based political publication, has a long list of tweeters on its Web site. source>>>

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