Guest Blog Post by @lesliecarbone

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, twitter is like a sewer: What you get out of it depends on what you put in to it. I’m truly grateful for the many tweeps who help keep the solitary life of this freelance consultant from becoming too lonesome. Many thanks to @markdavidson for this opportunity to guest post and for being one of my favorite tweeps!

I first learned about twitter from @newmediajim last year at a Direct Marketing Association of Washington meeting; I started tweeting soon after and was genuinely surprised when people started following me pretty quickly.

Perhaps the best unforeseen benefit of twitter has been the opportunity to connect with so many tweeps from the greater Boston area, especially over Red Sox games. Though I’ve been living in Virginia for nearly 20 years, I grew up in Massachusetts, and it’s so nice to build relationships with people from my native commonwealth, even as I feel pangs of homesick envy when they tweet about going to Fenway Park.

Besides Red Sox games, my favorite thing to tweet is political events. The primary debates were especially fun, and I can’t wait to tweet and argue and laugh over the upcoming conventions and general debates with my fellow poli-tweeps.

Through @jptrenn, twitter brought me the great opportunity to participate in My ooVoo Day-Political Edition. I hosted a chat on whether conservatives should support John McCain—imo NO! The following night, I held a session on how conservatives should improve our use of social media, with tweeps @jennsierra, @ccubedblogger, and @morningbrewva.

Little did any of us on the latter chat know that twitter would really prove its mettle less than a day later with the start of the #dontgo movement. When Speaker Nancy Pelosi adjourned the House without action to lower gas prices, House Republicans staged a protest, staying in the House chamber and giving speeches on the importance of increasing domestic oil production. But the Democrats, who control Congress, shut off the cameras and even the lights. So word of the Republican Revolt spread through twitter!

But that’s half the fun of twitter. You just never know what’ll happen next.

Leslie Carbone is the author of Slaying Leviathan: The Moral Case for Tax Reform (Potomac, 2009). Her work has appeared in magazines including The Weekly Standard and The American Enterprise, in newspapers from The Philadelphia Inquirer to The San Francisco Chronicle, and on Web sites like BreakPoint and National Review Online.

She has appeared on more than 200 radio and television talk shows, been quoted in national newspapers including The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and lectured at more than 100 campuses across the United States and in Canada, including Northwestern University, UCLA, and Cornell University.

Ms. Carbone has served as Chief-of-Staff to the late Assemblyman Gil Ferguson of California, Director of Family Tax Policy at Family Research Council, Senior Writer at Koch Industries, Inc., and Speechwriter for U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao.

If you’ve enjoyed Leslies’s guest post on digital culture, please consider reading some of the other articles she’s written or has appeared in on the web.

Leslie Carbone on Writers Net.

Leslie Carbone on Roots Wire.

Leslie Carbone on Union Leader.

Leslie Carbone on Righty Blogs.

Leslie Carbone on Town Hall.