Let me tell you about Wikipedians, who write and improve Wikipedia articles.

Wikipedians take this role – self-appointed, uncompensated, largely unrecognized – more seriously than you probably take your full-time job.

When your Congressman's staffer tried to whitewash a Wikipedia entry ahead of the election, erasing well-cited coverage of an illegal campaign contribution, Wikipedians noticed, undid the change, and shooed him away. That probably all happened while you were watching a 30 Rock rerun.

And when your daughter clicked Google's first link about the Pythagorean Theorem, arrived at Wikipedia, and finally really "got" how it worked – a Wikipedian wrote that article. The article was a collaboration, some Wikipedians knew the math, others knew how to communicate it and others just fixed typos.

The news that Twitter has taken the first steps towards a stock market flotation has triggered a predictable storm of speculation about the valuation of the company. How much is a corporation with 200 million monthly users actually worth? How does it compare with Facebook, with its billion users?

The answer is: nobody knows. But that doesn't matter because it's not the important question. Although Twitter and Facebook are categorised as social networking services, in fact they are as different as chalk and cheese. And, of the two, Twitter is more important in one respect: its impact on the arena in which societies discuss their political issues.

Between the massive shifts occurring today among marketers in the use of digital versus “traditional” media (i.e., television, radio, print) – and the associated questions of the relative effectiveness of each – one can’t help but wonder if the use of digital media in politics is actually advancing the political process.

It is certainly undeniable that digital media played a pivotal role in securing both the 2008 and 2012 elections for President Obama. The Obama campaign’s “Digital First” strategy, architected by David Plouffe, pioneered new ways of reaching and mobilizing voters based on a differentiated strategy. This approach contrasted with a Republican campaign built largely around reaching voters through traditional media.