Political Talk - One of

Political Talk - One of the better experiements in local electronic political discussion is PoliTalk. It's produced by Tim Erickson, a St. Paul guy who has a long-standing involvement in political communication.

PoliTalk is different from some of your typical political chat lists or email discussion groups: rather than serving as an open forum, Erickson serves up a topic at a time, a couple times a year, for a closed-ended discussion; discussions last a few weeks at the most. It's very structured in format - which means the discussion is a lot less free-wheeling than a Usenet group. But the signal-to-noise ratio is very high - as opposed to Usenet or, say, the rapidly-sclerosing chain of E-Democracy email listserves.

The next topic: Transatlantic Perspectives on Invading Iraq. Politalk discussions are worth the time, and I urge "Shot" readers to check it out, when things kick off this week.