It has been fascinating to watch GOP lawmakers during the past few days take to the House floor – even though Congress has adjourned for a five week District Work Period (read: vacation) – urging Speaker Pelosi to call Members back for a vote on energy relief.

Since MSM cameras are “dark” and reporters are locked out when Congress isn’t officially in session, the only way to communicate has been via the Internet.

A massive grassroots effort has grown online with the recent launch of the new #dontgo web site that Patrick Ruffini dubs “officially a movement.”

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Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) is on Twitter @johnculberson. So is Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) @timryan. For those who don’t know, Twitter is a microblog that enables users to “tweet” out short text messages in 140 characters or less (about a sentence or two) designed to answer this question: “What are you doing right now?”

The popularity of the site has certainly grown, especially in the world of politics in recent months:

• The White House has been on Twitter for about a year.
  UPDATE 1/2009: President George W. Bush’s Twitter account (@TheWhiteHouse) was closed shortly after President Obama was sworn-in. The new account may be found at @whitehouse.
• Many presidential hopefuls were Twitterng early in the 2008 campaign including Sens. Edwards, Obama, Clinton and McCain.
• At the Personal Democracy Forum (PdF) on June 23-24 in New York, Ana Marie Cox moderated a policy debate between Liz Mair (for McCain) and Mike Nelson (for Obama) via Twitter (hashtag: #pdfdebate).
• Just this past week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was Twittering live from the G8 Summit in Toyako, Japan.

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Despite my United Airlines snafu, I finally made it to Austin and had a couple productive days at SWSW Interactive (SXSWi).  However, I had to leave a little early for an offsite meeting in NY on a rainy Monday morning before the conference officially ended.  In fact, the music and film portion of SXSW - the highlight for most attendees – was just gearing up. 

On my way to the Austin airport, my cab driver remarked that I was leaving before all the real fun began!  Thanks.  So, I boarded my plane and started thinking about what he said and had to disagree.  I learned a little bit, met some great new people and actually had fun doing it.  

Not sure there were any groundbreaking new developments this year, but this was my first SXSW so somewhat hard to judge.  Having said that, I felt confident when I walked out of each discussion that I had a strong grasp of the material covered.  Wow, sounds like I am in college again.

The first session I attended was entitled ”Filching Design: When the Shoe Fits.” I really liked Luke Wroblewski’s (LukeW Interface Designs/Yahoo) presentation who showed various sites with similar designs and polled the audience as to whether they were “filch or fair.”  

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