[LINK] "Game on: Twitter stages the first one-on-one debate"

[rfmcdonald]

Oh, Twitter.

“A one-on-one debate? Any time. Any place,” Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff tweeted in direct response to Conservative Leader Stephen Harper’s challenge Wednesday morning to a nationally televised debate one-on-one.

With Ignatieff tweeting his reply, the social media campaign — the addictively caffeinated conversation that is happening online across Canada since Saturday’s election launch — just stepped up to a new level.

It may even get more notice than the couple of million viewers who normally watch the televised election brawls.

Mind you, Ignatieff’s “twitter-dare” as one journalist called it, came a couple of hours after the Liberal leader had replied the old fashioned way to Harper — via a bunch of reporters at a news conference who’d already tweeted, blogged and filed it to the Web as a news story.

Still, with Ignatieff’s tweet, Campaign 2011 officially became the Twitter campaign to watch.

It earned a direct reply from Harper around 4:35 p.m. “curiously, my team proposed 1:1 to TV consortium today; however, your team did not speak up,” the Conservative leader posted.

All federal parties are using Twitter along with Facebook in the bid to get votes.

But Twitter’s succinct 140-character bursts of insight, humour, sarcasm, analysis and amusement appear to be leading the national conversation.

It makes for a real-time head-spinning online debate, or three.

There’s one conversation going on between opinion-makers and shapers — the political parties and their operatives and journalists and bloggers.

It’s a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour to-and-fro.

There’s a second conversation going on between the political parties and their direct audiences — the thousands of potential voters who are “following” — or reading — them.

At times, that appears to be an intimate conversation: Conservative Leader Stephen Harper tweeted on Day 1 of the campaign to his son Ben.

“Ben, Great win! And against older guys! The team must be excited. Congratulate them all for me. Dad.”

Yet, even the intimacy was no doubt meant for the broader audience. A photo on the Conservative party website shows Harper on the campaign plane, typing the in-flight tweet to Ben on his iPad after Ben’s “team had just won a volleyball tournament.”

And now, a third conversation — between the leaders themselves — appears to be developing.</blockquote?