Twitter

Minnesota and 37 other states got failing grades for their public-records laws from the Better Government Association (BGA), which scored states in five categories: response time, appeals, expedited review, fees and sanctions. Sluggish action on government-data requests sunk our state in the rankings (pdf), despite high marks for mercilessly punishing violators — an unusual combination.

Iran has proven the headline prescient, even if the terminology needed tweaking: “The revolution will be Twittered.” That was the title of Tom Elko’s Sept. 9, 2008, Minnesota Independent post about how Twitter messages (technically, “tweets” that were “tweeted”) came in handy during protests outside the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

Former Sen. Norm Coleman’s recent comment that the future of the GOP lies in the “ethernet” — first reported on by the Minnesota Independent — gets an honorable mention in Talking Points Memo’s list of the “Top 7 Conservative New Media FAILS So Far this Year.” But Norm’s no match for other conservatives on the [...]

The Hauser family’s media ride climaxes with … a ride home, provided by the media. Las Vegas-based Asgaard Media got Colleen Hauser and her cancer-stricken son Daniel off the lam, onto a chartered red-eye flight and home to Sleepy Eye, Minn., by 3 a.m. Monday. The film company distributed a video interview with the pair, [...]

Gov. Tim Pawlenty unveiled his new Twitter home page only yesterday. Then why does the color scheme suggest it was designed for a Soviet socialist in the 1920s? (After the jump is Aleksandr Rodchenko’s cover for the 1927 book, “Materialization of the Fantastic” — not a bad campaign slogan for Pawlenty ‘12 actually.)

Here’s evidence that Minnesota’s post-election battle for U.S. Senate has permeated pop culture. Al Franken and Norm Coleman were cited this week by contestants in another competition that attracted millions of partisans: the race between movie actor Ashton Kutcher and news juggernaut CNN to be first to gain one million followers on Twitter, the social-media [...]

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak finally got a big public payback for his early backing of Barack Obama as candidate for president when Obama gave the city a shout-out in his address before Congress tonight. Speaking about the beneficial effects of the federal stimulus package, the president said:
There are 57 police officers who are still on [...]

With the Star Tribune possibly within two weeks of filing bankruptcy (according to newsroom Guild sources), we’re seeing yet another wave of big-name departures at the Strib: columnist Katherine Kersten, online managing editor Will Tacy and web designer Jaime Chismar, among others. But curiously, if you’re on the microblogging service Twitter, you might get the [...]

Tweets — the 140-character mini-blog posts sent via Twitter — are very much of-the-moment and therefore often have a fairly short shelf-life. But in reviewing these brief dispatches sent by our reporters during the Republican National Convention, we found that, despite the 140-character restraint and the inevitable typos that result from punching in text on a cellphone while ducking teargas canisters, an RNC-only best-of list was a fitting way to capture the humor, excitement and surreal nature of last summer’s event.

The Minnesota Independent liveblogged and tweeted (at MnIndyLIVE) the Nov. 26 State Canvassing Board meeting, at which Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie led the five-person board in considering the Al Franken for Senate campaign’s request that they find a way to count votes from all improperly rejected absentee ballots.