Recently, I recieved an email that came as a bit of a surprise to me. Well known political blogger James Joyner from Outside the Beltway emailed me and asked if I would mind guest blogging at OTB while he attended an event in Los Angeles. I’m pretty happy about that considering James and I had a pretty rocky start but obviously our relationship has come far enough that he gave me keys to his blog.

I posted Everything I Needed to Know About Politics I Learned on Facebook over at OTB this morning and I’ll share a few excerpts here. Then you can go read the article for yourself. I’m really curious to know your thoughts.

Social Media is the wave of the future. You don’t have to be a blogger or a blog follower or even a blog agnostic to recognize that the cool kids are hanging out at places like Facebook, or MySpace. Have you heard about Twitter – the pseudo instant conversation maker that mashes up web, IM and SMS into something that has become the tool of instant conversation and marketing? Twitter is heavily used by the tech web community, a typically left-of-center political demographic, and last month took the SXSW Interactive conference by storm, tripling the number of daily users from 20k to 60k in 3 days.

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Social media is a generational thing, and the vote cannot be secured simply by speeches. Netizens probably won’t pay a lot of attention. However, Giuliani might just notice that there are over 1500 members in the Facebook group America’s Mayor, “œAmerica’s President. Giuliani 2008″³ and that there are 57K+ members plus in the “œAnti-Hillary Clinton for President “˜08″³ group.

James asked me to blog while he was gone because he felt like the areas where I write on Technosailor – the areas of technology and new media – intersect in an important way with politics. I think he’s on to something, though you might want me to go back home. Regardless, my postings over the next few days (which won’t be nearly as prolific as James’) will hopefully bring some of the discussions in my area of interest to bear in the political and cultural world to the forefront.