Twitter’s brilliant. This General Election has been made extraordinarily fun by being able to share what’s going on with the old Hive Mind, getting news within seconds from people in the heart of the action and generally mucking about being as silly as possible. Yesterday’s cries of, “Activate the Queen!” and this morning’s fantastic gag from @armyofdave says it all:

“Vince, could you just check these Budget figures for me, please?”
“George, this is a picture of a pony.”

Then there’s the more serious stuff, like spreading the word about the hideous failure of justice in Paul Chamber’s case, and Guardian editors quickly responded, using Twitter to get in touch with and extract a blog post from the man himself.

The Political Blogosphere is, like it or not, divided up along factional lines, into party political ‘swarms’. It’s rare to jump from one ‘swarm’ to another, with only a tiny minority joining up these swarms together by linking to each other. The BNP ‘swarm’ is almost entirely isolated from the rest of the political blogosphere, and curiously there are much more connections between Liberal and Conservative blogs than Liberal and Labour blogs. Curious that, isn’t it?

So the best thing about Twitter? There’s no such factional boundaries. Even if you don’t follow people who disagree with you, someone you DO follow will echo something they’ve said and you begin to build a picture of wide spectrum of opinion. For me, as a blogger, being able to hear people’s reactions and keep up to date with current events means I’m constantly refreshed and full of new ideas of topics to write about – at least for now. It’s not just me, either. Steve Bell, the Guardian’s cartoonist, has obviously been paying attention too.

I do hope I’ve not driven people mad with my abuse of Twitter over the last 5 days. I’m sure things will be returning to normal soon. You can find my Twitter stream here at http://twitter.com/charlottegore, and if you fancied joining the 1,229 people that seem perfectly content to tolerate my crap then, well, I can’t actually stop you.

Finally, if you’re already following me and you actually like it (what’s WRONG WITH YOU?) then do feel free to vote for @charlottegore at the House of Twits. They’re trying to create a chart of political twitterers. It’s pure willy waggling, of course, but being squeezed between Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale has brought out my competitive streak. I throw myself at your mercy!

Well, blogging’s dead. Didn’t you know? The real action is taking place on Twitter. So you’ve signed up to Twitter and you want to make the biggest impression possible. What do you do?

That’s right, it’s time for another slightly evil guide to Tweeting.

#10: Get involved with every trending topic.

Some subjects ‘trend’ – that means lots of people are talking about one particular subject. It’s important that you get involved with them all as enthusiastically as possible, because there’s nothing people love more than seeing 100 tweets about something they don’t understand. It makes their day interesting!

“Fingle fingle whopper is AWESOME TREND! loloolol #finglewhopper”

#9: Tweet Everything

We’ve all heard the joke that people join Twitter so that they’ve got an audience for when they fit a ceramic bus with some new brown cables. It’s not a joke. This is what people want. Every single thought that passes through your head must be tweeted, and every single thing you do must go on the record.

Your admiring followers will worship you for it.

“I really should get round to counting the number of paces between my desk and the coffee machine.”

#8: Tweet Constantly

Don’t be fooled – blogging is for the lazy. You can write a blog post like this and set the timer to publish it at a specific time, say, 3pm, and then forget about it. Twitter, on the other hand, requires constant nurturing and feeding. If you’re already ‘tweeting everything’ then this shouldn’t be a problem, but sometimes there’s gaps – so tweet about tweeting if you have to.

“RT: Damn! Forgot to indicate on that bend! lollololl!!”

#7: Reply and Retweet everything.

Another strategy for generating sufficient content for your Twitter feed is to reply to absolutely everyone who tweets at you – but be sure to add a full stop before the ‘@sucker’ bit so that everyone who follows you can see what you’re saying. Be sure to retweet everything anyone says to you, too. Wouldn’t want anyone to miss out a single moment of your life, would you? It sometimes helps if you have a Bot to do this for you. I’m happy to program one for you, for a measly £10k, but think – what’s money compared with being the most awesome Twitterer in the world?

“RT @angry_man: OH FFS YOU MORON STFU!!! <— LULZZZ!! DDD”

#6: Always get the last word

If you’re replying to everything you’ve already got this covered, but it’s an important enough principle that it needs restating – whatever happens, make sure you get the last word. Superficially easy, simply reply to everything, including the replies. This makes you The Boss Of Twitter if you do it consistently.

“. @angelboobs14532 Really? Britney Spears porn? Yay! Thank you!”

#5: Change your Avatar and Name every few hours

Keep things fresh and funky! By changing your Avatar and name every few hours, your followers (you do still have some followers, right?) will think, Hey! Who’s that interesting person? And they’ll be forced to check it out and realise it’s their old friend, YOU! Their hearts will be filled with a warm glow, because, for a minute there, they thought they’d lost you.

“I have a new name ROFL! I am now @MAXIMOR_INDESTRUCTABLE lololol!!”

#4: Tweet the results of Quizzes religiously

The Twitterverse offers lots of quizzes that you can take so long as you give them permission to send Tweets from your account. This gives you an invaluable opportunity to give your followers this crucial and informative knowledge – how Gay are you? How clever are you? What Scooby Doo character are you? People need to know this information, and they need to know where they can find out these important facts about themselves.

This is your public service. Your duty. Your destiny.

“lol I am 34% Furry! (Take the How Furry are you test at http://los.er/101)”

#3: Be Clear: You’re Awesome.

Your followers aren’t interested in the adventures of a normal person. You must become a God, walking amongst their people – benign and magnificent. You are the perfect weight, height, tremendously good looking, people fall at your feet to admire you. When you’re telling your followers you’re doing a number two, this is what you should write:

“lol! Another gold plated poo! And HUGE too! Biggest ever!”

#2: Rick-roll your followers several times a day.

Nothing your followers love more than finding themselves redirected to a Youtube video of Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give you Up”.

“Research shows that you can drink yourself sober after all: http://bit.ly/rickr (NOT Rick-roll this time!)”

“Sorry, here’s the real link. http://bit.ly/rickr. Real thing this time, definitely not Rick-roll.”

“Ha ha! Got you again! Okay, well, here’s the real link, fo real: http://bit.ly/rickr.”

#1: Follow Everyone who Follows Iain Dale.

So you now have all the knowledge you need to create a truly winning and successful Twitter feed. But where do you get your audience from? Where do you get your followers? It’s simple! Follow everyone who follows Iain Dale. Most will automatically follow you back, and these are all profoundly important and influential people who’ll spread the word about this hottest new talent! Don’t forget to Retweet what they say about you!

“Anyone else been added by @MAXIMOR_INDESTRUCTABLE? Stupid Spammer alert! <– LOLOLOL!!!!”

Yes, Twitter. It’s amazing. Now, who wants to follow me?

It’s hard to measure how elated I feel.

A rabble rousing propaganda piece – deployed to great effect in mentally numbing the drones at the Labour Conference – has been chosen as Labour’s new Party Political Broadcast. This news has been met with cheers of delight by all sections of the political bubblesphere.

The video is called, “Against the Odds” and recounts the heroic struggle against reality by Labour over the last 100 years – a battle, it seems, they’ve won. Epic won.

See, Labour’s spent the first ten years of their current period in office waiting for Gordon Brown to take over so they could do some ‘real’ Labour stuff. They knew, or at least believed, that by keeping to the moderate, centre ground (or, “keeping the fucking beardy weirdies off the telly”) they could stay in power. While they weren’t getting everything they wanted it was still better than the Tories.

Now, with their doom inevitable, Labour are now beginning to reflect on their time in office with a sort of dewy eyed nostalgia. It’s been a triumph, a golden era – we are, it seems, extremely lucky to have had them.

Do you see the problem, though? During Blair they bemoaned the lack of progress. Now, with Brown, they’re celebrating all the progress they made.

So the decision to use this video is a significant one. It’s not aimed at Liberal Democrat voters, or Conservative voters, or SNP voters, or Plaid voters, or swing voters or undecided voters. They’re trying to prevent Labour voters dragging the Government down in their suicidal malaise. They’re trying to motivate the core, the True Believers.

The language is that of war – the constant repetition of the word, “fight” and “fighters”. They’re fighting us. They’re fighting you. They’re fighting me. This is a war and they’re motivating their troops to do battle against Labour’s enemies. This sort of rhetoric does for Labour what Sarah Palin did for the Republicans -sending everyone else screaming and running in the opposite direction.

It’s nauseating, profoundly partisan stuff. There’s a schmaltzy Sean Bean-a-like narration invoking the old Hovis advert vision of a simple and pleasantly prolitarian Britain filled with ordinary, common working folk that need to… er…  fight against our enemies and the system that denies us what we deserve, Comrades! Swing voters, beware.

What effect will this Party Political Broadcast have? Absolutely none, obviously – no-one watches the bloody things anyway. It apparently reduces certain Labour activists to tears. For hardened, embittered cynics like me, Against All Odds reduces me to tears of laughter – it begs – no, it demands mockery, it demands parody.

What else could I do? Cue several hours of relentless mockery in one of Labour’s little corners of Twitter. Their celebration of Labour’s triumphs became a hotbed of ego deflating irony and sarcasm:

The Labour Party also abolished slavery, put a man on the moon, started the Enlightenment and – AND – killed Hitler.

Mr Kipling’s exceedingly good cake recipes were stolen from Ramsey MacDonald.

Gordon Brown was immaculately concieved by himself. He *is* the Manse!

We had fun with this one. It went on and on, lots of people got involved and came up with their own brilliant little gems.

As long as Labour’s only strategy for winning back the hearts and minds of the British people is boasting and bragging about their achievements, I think it’s safe to say that this sort of irreverent mockery is how the rest of us can stay sane.

UPDATE: Sara Bedford has done a wonderful fisk of this video here. Highly recommended.