The FCC recently launched a new Twitter account – @FCCDotGov. For those who may be unfamiliar with Twitter (despite Conan O’Brien’s routine ridicule of the service), the micro-blogging platform allows users to send out short updates on just about any topic. Many people envision this as an endless stream of “I had a sandwich for breakfast” notes. However many users share valuable news and information via the service. Companies are also getting into the swing of things and using the service for everything from customer service to sales promotions.

We at NCTA have been using Twitter for about a year and a half to provide updates on our blog content, to promote the Cable Show, and for conversation with and commentary by our CEO Kyle McSlarrow. We’re pleased to see the FCC adopting Twitter and welcome them to this vibrant online discussion.

The FCC account already has over 1,000 followers, and we’re a few of them.  The Internet provides a healthy forum for telecom policy discussion and debate. The number of followers they’ve already amassed indicates the interest level for that dialog.  To welcome them to Twitter, and to share some of our favorites with you, we thought we’d put together a list of our favorite follows.  These are in no particular order, they’re just good content from some very engaging viewpoints.

• @Normative – Julian Sanchez is the Washington Editor for Ars Technica. He covers politics, technology, and even comic books.
• @RobPegoraro – Rob has been critical of cable in the past, but he always brings a fresh perspective to technology. While he styles himself as a local reporter covering the DC area, he has attracted an audience much larger in scope.
• @BlankBaby – Scott McNulty recently took the helm of Comcast Voices – the company’s corporate blog. The blog provides the perspective of the nation’s largest cable provider. Prior to joining Comcast, McNulty was a prolific contributor to The Unofficial Apple Weblog
• @KyleMcSlarrow – Even if he wasn’t our boss, we’d have to recommend Kyle. He does, after all, represent the industry that brings voice, video and broadband to more than 63 million American homes.
• @CZ – While Verizon is a competitor, John Czwartacki does a great job handling their social media outreach.
• @msilbey – Mari Silbey writes for ZatzNotFunny and also handles corporate blogging for Motorola at Media Experiences 2 Go.
• @DaveZatz – Dave is the editor and creator of ZatzNotFunny. He also writes for Engadget and PC Magazine.
• @Om – To many readers of tech publications, Om Malik needs no introduction. His blog GigaOm is a must read for the tech and gadget fan.
• @mmasnick – Mike Masnick is the author of TechDirt, a group blog that covers policy and technology as they shape business innovation.
• @SchatzWSJ – Amy Schatz covers telecom policy for the Wall Street Journal. She covers the FCC and Tech policy, so she’s a definite must.
• @ReginaHopper – Regina is the face of NextGenWeb and a prolific Tweeter. Much of her stream is news and information about broadband – a good source for stories you might have missed.
• @SaulHansell – Saul is the editor of the NY Times Bits Blog and covers everything from advertising to pricing and policy.
• @AdamThierer – Adam is the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s technology policy guru.
• @FreePress – We often disagree on the issues, but we always respect their position.  That’s why we follow them.
• @CJSettles – Craig Settles is a telecom industry analyst.
• @mcuban – You may know him as the Dallas Mavericks Owner or former Dancing With the Stars Contestant, but before that, he made his fortune on Internet content and has a lot to say about telecommunications.
• @linkhoe – Assistant Vice President for Internet and Technology at Verizon. An important player in telecom and frequent contributor to Verizon’s policy blog.
• @joseiswriting – Jose Antonio Vargas formerly covered technology and politics for the Washington Post and is now Technology Editor for the Huffington Post.
• @waltmossberg – Walt is the author and creator of the Personal Technology column in the Wall Street Journal and a Contributor to AllThingsD
• @artbrodsky – Art’s another person with whom we often disagree, but he always brings an interesting perspective as an advocate and blogger for Public Knowledge.

These are some of the really interesting voices in telecommunications on Twitter. Our friends at the FCC will learn a lot from them, and we hope you will, too.

Update: We probably should have added this at the start, but if you think we’ve missed someone, please drop a comment and let us know.  We’re always looking for more people to follow.

Following up on yesterday’s post about retransmission consent negotiations between Time Warner Cable and broadcaster LIN TV, there are a few additional details.

Some blogs had interesting reactions, such as CrunchGear and VideoNuze.  Since I’m not a sports fan, I neglected to note that this past weekend’s football games focused a spotlight on this issue.  According to Multichannel News, Time Warner and LIN continued their talks yesterday. A Bloomberg story from Friday adds some nuance about the financial issues lying behind the negotiations.

Viewers of a LIN station in New York, WIVB Buffalo, got upset when they noticed some critical comments were being deleted on an online forum.  For example:

• A viewer in Lewiston: “I thought these forums were for discussion, complaints, compliments, etc? Why is it every time I come to this forum, the posts about the TW?CHANNEL4 are deleted/removed? Whats up with that???”
• A viewer in Tonawanda: “I came here to topix on my lunch hour to find that there are all of the sudden NO posts about your fight with time warner since SATURDAY!?!?!?!?  Considering that there were about 40 topics here last night, I find it interesting that people who claim to be “connected” would resort to such censorship.”

And so on and so on…

Speaking of online forums, Jeff Simmermon, Director of Digital Communications for Time Warner Cable, did an interview with the blog Austinist about the situation with KXAN, the LIN station in Austin, TX. In addition, Simmermon and KXAN knocked gloves on Twitter. Here are some excerpts:

whitneyredman: @KXAN_News KXAN and LIN TV is freaking laaaame.
JeffTWC: @whitneyredman — I know the feeling, Whitney. I can’t decide this any more than KXAN can … it’s all up to LIN TV.
whitneyredman: @jeffTWC Does LIN TV have a Twitter?
JeffTWC: @whitneyredman — no, they’re just a poor little media conglomerate with a couple TV stations to limp by on …
KXAN_News: @JeffTWC It’s not ALL up to LIN, Jeff. Check out the facts at http://blogs.kxan.com/kxantimewarner
JeffTWC: @KXAN_News — if “less than a penny per day per subscriber” is such a piddly sum, why are you guys making such a stink?
KXAN_News: @jeffTWC I guess we could ask you the same thing…up there in your big tower in NYC.
JeffTWC: @KXAN_News — everyone knows I’m promoting my business’s best interests here. You’re doing the same thing and calling it journalism.
JeffTWC: @KXAN_News — I think the real question here is: which of us is rubber, and which of us is glue?

Time Warner also launched a website on the issue: The Truth Hurts KXAN! I mentioned that Time Warner produced a video explaining how subscribers can find some content from LIN stations online for free. The video (which you can see embedded below) also explains how to connect your computer to your television in order to watch that programming on TV.

UPDATE: In Green Bay, Time Warner has the website Tell the Truth WLUK!

As a bit of a political junkie, I’m very excited to see the presidential debate tonight. I’ll be watching it on cable, as I watched the conventions on cable previously (Note my earlier post on the cable’s convention coverage).  You’ve got your choice of CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, C-SPAN, Fox Business, and BBC America.

But suppose you can’t see it tonight. Or maybe you want to watch it over again tomorrow. Well, good news for Comcast cable subscribers. The three presidential debates, and the vice presidential debate, will be available On Demand, the day after their original broadcast. C-SPAN, Comcast Media Center and TVN Entertainment are teaming up to make the debates available to viewers. [I stand corrected. Other cable operators are also carrying the debates on Video on Demand as well. Check your local system.]

Comcast has already made On Demand programming available from the Democratic and Republican conventions, major speeches from the candidates and Spanish language content.

You may recall an earlier post on C-SPAN’s Convention Hub, which provided online coverage of the two conventions. Now they’ve launched Debate Hub, a one-stop shop for embeddable video of the debates, coverage from the blogosphere and a variety of other tools for broadband subscribers.

Features include:

• Embeddable video of all debates in their entirety from the C-SPAN Video Library. Users can edit, share and post this video on their own websites.
• Interactive timelines that allow users to watch the debate or read the transcript question-by-question and candidate-by-candidate.
• Word trees that give visual representations of the language used by each candidate throughout the debates.
• Aggregated blog and Twitter coverage of the debates, enabling users to follow the latest online debate news and analysis.
• Debate Cam, providing live streaming video from multiple locations including the debate hall, media filing center, protest area and on-campus debate watch parties.

And while it has nothing to do with cable, I have to give a shout-out to Twitter’s new Election 2008 portal, which allows you see tweets flowing by in real time.

When it comes to politics and cable, I don’t think anyone would disagree that C-SPAN is the jewel in the crown. I mean no disrespect to the fine work done by the various cable news networks, but C-SPAN started their coverage of this election (”Road to the White House 2008“) in December of 2004 and has shown somewhere around 5,000 hours of coverage so far.

C-SPAN has been advertised as “Cable’s Gift to America,” since it was created by cable companies as a public service in 1979 (contrary to the mistaken belief by some that C-SPAN is the Government Channel). Over the last three decades, “the political network of record” has now grown to three public affairs television networks, a radio station (also available on XM), and a website — all provided for through the support of the cable industry.

(Let’s recall that, in most instances, your local cable company pays a carriage fee to the programmer in order to bring you your favorite channel. Cable programmers have dual revenue streams — carriage fees & advertising — which is one of the reasons that a la carte would be harmful to them.)

C-SPAN, like other cable programmers, has been moving into the digital arena. As we enter the Academy Awards seasons of politics, with the Democratic Convention starting on Monday and the Republican Convention following the week after, C-SPAN has unveiled the Convention Hub.

This pair of portals (one for Denver and one for Minneapolis) includes a variety of features:

• Real-time tracking of credentialed state and national political bloggers, aggregated on the websites, to enable users to follow the latest online convention news and analysis;
• Video clips from the network’s convention coverage, embeddable, to facilitate use by political bloggers and other convention watchers;
• Linkable access to the complete C-SPAN Video Library, allowing interested users to fully search all C-SPAN video content;
• Live coverage of C-SPAN television and radio networks;
• Blogger Tips and Online Convention Video Finder tools;
• Real-time feeds from Twitter users using the hash-tags #RNC08 and #DNC08

New Media Strategies (NMS), an Arlington-based online intelligence and marketing firm, was brought on to design proprietary software technology for Convention Hub. C-SPAN maintains editorial control.

All this is on top of C-SPAN’s usual excellent election coverage, which will begin each morning with Washington Journal at 7:00 AM (ET) and run through the closing of each day’s floor proceedings. In addition, C-SPAN 2 will bring you events like live coverage of the Republican Platform Meetings and Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic.

C-SPAN has expanded its traditional television coverage with the technological approaches in order to attract new viewers. C-SPAN’s loosening of copyright restriction over the past few months (embeddable video is new for the conventions) is enabling bloggers to use C-SPAN content in creative ways and helps to expand C-SPAN’s core mission to educate and inform the American populace.

But it’s important to realize that all this coverage may be a gift, but it ain’t free. It costs money to run C-SPAN’s operations and the support of cable operators is a critical part of the network’s success. Despite some criticism (like this), it’s important to remember that C-SPAN is a business, not a government program. This NY Times story makes the case:

In May, C-Span said that it had for first time asserted its copyright against a video-clip site, ordering YouTube to take down copies of Stephen Colbert’s pointed speech in front of President Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Clips of the speech had been viewed 2.7 million times on YouTube in the 48 hours before it was taken down.

“What I think a lot of people don’t understand — C-Span is a business, just like CNN is,” [C-SPAN Corporate Vice President & General Counsel Bruce] Collins said. “If we don’t have a revenue stream, we wouldn’t have six crews ready to cover Congressional hearings.”