A great victory for social media

The rapid and intense backlash against D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray's cutting streetcar funds was a great victory for transit advocacy, but it was also a great victory for social media — blogs, Twitter, Facebook and more.

It was amazing to see the speed with which the news and calls to action spread. According to council officials, there were more than 1,000 calls to Gray's office within just a few hours, most before the council even voted. It's also interesting to see the way reporters responded to this. Most talked about social media's effect, but a few have mysteriously left it out entirely.

Our report was very quickly picked up and reconfirmed by many other blogs... and many more asked people to call Gray's office, in most cases well before the vote.

Twitter, too, lit up with the news. Our first tweet was retweeted with and without modifications numerous times; According to bit.ly's summary, it got 388 clicks, 70 "shares" on Facebook, and 47 retweets, which don't even include the ones using Twitter's "native retweet" functionality. And that was just one tweet from one blog. Here's the one for DCist's first tweet. Dave Stroup, Frozen Tropics, and numerous others kept tweeting developments in the story and snarky jokes about the situation.

The development even drove some people and groups to start using social media.

Continue reading this post by David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington here.

David Alpert is founder and editor of Greater Greater Washington . The Local Blog Network is a group of bloggers from around the D.C. region who have agreed to make regular contributions to All Opinions Are Local.