As David Cohn wrote yesterday evening on Twitter during the South Carolina Primary coverage: “I can follow politics just by watching the right people on Twitter.” And it’s true. While some people abhor the idea of using Twitter for political discussion – as indicated by some feedback I got when I talked about it a few weeks ago – others find it to be an excellent use of the medium.

Taking this one step further is the site Politweets, which takes any tweet about any of the Presidential candidates and places it on an easy to read single page. On the left side you get the Democratic tweets, on the right side the Republican tweets. Watching it yesterday during the South Carolina primary it was going crazy with the most up-to-date news and some very useful insights and links.

Politweets will no doubt be a great tool leading all the way up to the actual election in November – I can’t wait to see the activity on Super Tuesday (February 5th) – but I would love to see the ability to sort by individual candidates. Right now the candidates are listed in the middle in terms of popularity (how many tweets they are mentioned in), if we could simply click on a candidates name and just get all of the tweets about them, that would be great.

In other tech/political news, the Politics Online Conference 2008 will be happening on March 4-5 in Washington D.C. Part of that conference will be the Golden Dot Awards 2008, which hands out awards for excellence in the online political arena in a wipe scope of categories (found here). Use the following form to nominate any site/podcast/video/etc you deem worthy.

Technology and politics are converging much more than ever before thanks in large part to the web. This in turn is helping more people stay informed on issues and get involved, always a good thing.

Read more coverage of Politweets:
Mashable
ReadWriteWeb
DownloadSquad
ZDNet
Huffington Post
Doug March (one of the founders of Politweets)
TechRepublican
Ted Shelton

More thoughts:

• CNN Implements Multi-Touch Technology In An Interesting Way For Primary Coverage
• Twitter As A Tool For Political Discussion
• Ron Paul Fails To Win 100% of the Vote
• TechCrunch Primaries a Great Idea, But…
• CNN and YouTube, Making Political Debate Matter Again
  
• Facebook Is Great For So Many Things: Giuliani’s Daughter Is Supporting Obama
• Renewable Energy: Google Puts Its R&D Where the Government’s Mouth Is
  
• The Biggest Issue in the 2008 Election