A huge Media House has decided to follow (us) bloggers, twitters, podcasters and others to the conventions. C-Span has finally joined the social media community in a big way. They will be creating hubs for the Democratic and Republican conventions. Bloggers (Citizen Journalists) will have access to videos for embedding and a place to link to sources for the "on the ground" stories.

I am happy to have C-Span join us. They have already begun following some twitters, including @digitalsista. Some of us have begun to include hash-tags in our tweets, thanks to discussions with people like Leslie Bradshaw. There will be many of us at the conventions, it is good to include C-Span as one of us. I guess we have to give kudos to New Media Strategies (NMS) and creative agency JESS3 for assisting C-Span to think about engaging the social media community. Susan Swain, Co-President, C-Span said:

“For nearly 30 years, C-SPAN has given voice to the opinions of the American public through its televised call-in programs. In 2008, Convention Hub allows C-SPAN to become a central point for the political opinions of the online community.”

The Convention Hub features will include:

• 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

This is exactly what I do, working with getting Women's Organizations into social media. Turner Strategies like NMS has been working with American Association of University Women (AAUW) and Women's Campaign Forum (WCF) to help them think about joining us in the social media sphere.

Why am I so happy? This means my tweets and blog posts will go through the feed. I will have access to C-Span's video clips as well as my footage of the "Woman on the Street" and profiles of Women Political Leaders at the conventions. This will mean more access and content.

I am still looking for more pro-choice women political leaders and delegates in both the Democratic and Republican parties. If you know of any that are attending the conventions, send them my way. Don't forget to stop by so I can include you in the "Women on the Street".

[This is a cross post with Women Wired In]