The account issued its first tweet about 20 hours ago, shortly after the launch of the now Internet-famous Demon Sheep ad created by the Carly Fiorina campaign. In that time it’s amassed over 850 followers and is quickly growing. Quite frankly, it’s hilarious.

The account is run by a 30-year-old conservative named Shayne Rivers. The Twitter user, who also runs his own personal account, works in health care, though he said he didn’t want to divulge too much information about himself.

“When the Carly ad exploded on Twitter, one of my followers, @rjhornsby, snatched up the @demonsheep username,” Rivers told me via email. “He asked @leonwolf, a blogger at RedState.com, to help him manage it. In turn, @leonwolf recruited me(@knifework), and the three of us started mocking Demon Sheep to the best of our ability. We had over 300 followers in under 7 hours. The fact that the #demonsheep hashtag started trending on Twitter did not hurt.”

Rivers said that all three of the people involved with the account are conservatives.

“And as conservatives, we are skeptical of all politicians and don’t mind mocking any of them…no matter their political affiliations.”

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I’ve taken particular interest in the O’Keefe story because he sent me a few emails before he became famous for his ACORN video; he had somehow heard that I specialize in digital PR and wanted to know if I could help him spread some videos he had made. After the exchanges I promptly forgot about him until later when his name was splashed all over the news.

Following his arrest and subsequent release I sent O’Keefe a few instant messages on G-chat, hoping to get some quotes from him about the incident, but received no response. But today I tweeted a link and headline to the Salon article, and several hours later received this email from O’Keefe:

you do realize onepeoplesproject is a fringe, radical group raided by the fbi, right?
that article is libelous guilt by associationm will be retracted and its pathetic someone like you linked to it

(Before I go on I should note the irony that O’Keefe pointed out the fact that One People’s Project was raided by the FBI when he, himself, was arrested by the FBI and has seemingly tried to claim that the agency’s charges are groundless.)

I immediately responded to O’Keefe that I would be glad to run a response to the Salon piece on Bloggasm. He responded with a link and the words “Looks like entire story was bogus and based on false sources, with the source admitting as such.” The link he gave led to a David Weigel piece in the Washington Independent in which Weigel doesn’t necessarily deny claims in the Salon article, just says that he couldn’t corroborate whether O’Keefe was sitting at a table handing out racist literature.

I responded to O’Keefe’s email, saying, “just to clarify: you weren’t at the table?”

He followed up with a link to a Big Government article in which he actually does deny sitting at a table; the piece also says that O’Keefe was at the event to watch a debate between panelists with radically different views, and that he wasn’t there to represent any particular viewpoint.

It should be noted that Blumenthal reached out to O’Keefe’s attorney with no response. Also, there are several other claims in the piece aside from O’Keefe’s attendance of the event. However, now that O’Keefe has officially responded to at least some of the accusations, I think it would certainly be fair for Salon to update the article, not only linking to O’Keefe’s response but also quoting the most pertinent parts.

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Speculative fiction author Jay Lake, who has had three books published by Tor with a fourth out soon, told me today that Amazon’s dominance when it comes to online book orders means that being blacklisted from the site can put a serious dent in a midlist author’s sales.

“The worry would be if I had a book released last Tuesday or this,” he said. “A significant portion of my initial sales velocity comes from the first days on Amazon. Writers like me sell relatively few books so that missing a few hundred initial sales, and the related rise in sales ranking and attention, could be damaging, quite possibly seriously.”

I asked if Tor had reached out to its authors at all during this entire ordeal to address any concerns that they may have. Lake said that it hadn’t, and that he had heard from a source that “Macmillan has instructed the entire staff from the top down not to speak on the record.”

In a blog post titled, “A Call For Author Support,” Tor author John Scalzi, while asserting that he was confident that he could weather the Amazon storm, said that there were no-doubt authors that would be affected.

“Many if not most of these folks do not have the financial cushion I do, and the sales that they are getting cut out of here are going to make a real and concrete difference to them when it comes time to tally up royalties, and when they’re trying to sell that next book,” he wrote. “I have friends who are deeply worried right now about what this thing is doing to them, and they should be worried, because it’s going to hurt them if it drags out. Amazon is not the entire sales universe, to be sure, but it’s a significant chunk, especially for genre writers who build their communities online and sell a large percentage of their work online (and thus through Amazon) because of it.”

Scalzi claimed that by waging war on Macmillan, Amazon was also waging war on Macmillan’s authors, and by extension their fans. Because of this, he said, people should “support the authors affected. Buy their books.” That is, in non-Amazon outlets.

Tobias Buckell, who has written several Tor titles, said that the extent of the damage depends on how long the dispute lasts.

“I have a fairly large online presence, and my print books are sold at Amazon obviously,” he said. “And for the past five or six years I’ve worked really hard to send people from my website to Amazon because it’s the dominant online book store. It has a tremendous impact because all my sales for my original Tor books will be dropping by 80% probably.”

Buckell noted that the effects on an author’s career can be more widespread than a temporary drop in sales. He pointed out that the print runs for future books — or even if an author can sell future books — are partially based on the sales of previous books, so that if a first-time author experiences weak sales, “down the road that affects their second book.”

Of course, authors may wake up tomorrow and find their books suddenly available for purchase at Amazon. But given how willingly it removed their titles, such an event wouldn’t put them completely at ease. The online retail giant has demonstrated that it’s willing to play hardball to settle pricing disputes, and book titles caught in the cross hairs are simply collateral damage.

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On an average day, Gizmodo receives over 4 million page views, an incredible number. But what about today? In the hour that Steve Jobs was making his announcement, Gizmodo received over 1.3 million page views.

There has been a ton of speculation over which is a bigger news event: State of the Union or Apple’s announcement. It’ll be interesting to check out the site statistics on sites like Daily Kos and Instapundit during Obama’s speech.

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By the time Scripting News blogger Dave Winer was added to Twitter’s Suggested User List earlier this month there was no turning back from his headlong fusillade attack on its very existence. For months the blogging pioneer had criticized the arbitrary, corporate media-like structure of the SUL, publishing charts and an array of anecdotal observations about the nature of the list and how it affected the users who were placed within it. Of course it escaped nobody’s attention that being placed on it could result in a half million additional Twitter followers, and when you consider the fact that the number of followers correlates strongly not only with a user’s ability to drive traffic, but also his very authority and influence, it’s not surprising that the methodology for composing the list would come under close scrutiny. Winer arguably led the pack of scrutinizers, going so far as to suggest that Twitter employees would use the SUL to manipulate coverage of the company, drawing favorable coverage from those who made the list and punishing its harshest critics with removal.

Late last week, Winer wrote a post acknowledging the fact that he had been included on the list, and one could almost detect an attempt to fit this inclusion within the parameters of his criticism. “Since I found out I was there, I haven’t posted anything on my Twitter account,” he wrote, “because that’s a terrible place to discuss something like this, and until I decide what to do I want to be very clear about whether I’ve gained from being on the new list.” His hesitance to denounce his placement on the SUL had to do with the fact that Twitter had created a new one — or rather a series of new ones — each based on a different niche. According to somewhat vague reports, these new lists were somehow predicated on algorithms rather than human editorial control.

Ultimately, however, Winer concluded that these changes were not enough, and true to form, he wrote a note to Twitter and asked to be removed. “People might think that I held back criticism for Twitter if I got this boost from the company providing the communication platform,” he wrote. “I know this because I’ve already felt inclined to withhold criticism because getting the approval feels nice.”

Though he remained intellectually honest, it’s hard to imagine the mental tenacity it must take to contemplate the addition of hundreds of thousands of new followers and then reject it. Being included on the SUL could propel one into the stratospheric elite group of Twitter users who can direct thousands of click-throughs to an article or blog post. Given that Matt Drudge’s power has been largely attributed to his ability to drive readers to off-site destinations, anyone could recognize the power that the SUL bestows.

But Winer wasn’t the only one to be placed on the SUL and then subsequently ask to be removed. Several months ago, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen promptly requested his own removal from the list. Coincidentally, Rosen co-hosts a podcast with Winer called Rebooting the News.

“It just seemed arbitrary to me,” Rosen told me recently. “Poorly thought-through. That was my main objection … It had a ‘because we say so’ feel to it, so in that sense you could say it was akin to Big Media.”

Unlike Winer, however, the NYU professor didn’t have a suggested alternative to the current methodology for compiling the list. He agreed with some who have suggested that a large quantity of followers does not automatically equate to value. For instance, those who are introduced to the list are often new users, ones who have relatively few followers and may abandon their accounts before launching a single tweet, whereas most of Twitter’s early adopters and most influential users joined the site long before the SUL was in existence. “I was not convinced that the additional users following me were really following me,” he said. “And I knew I would lose any natural metric for how I was doing in building a constituency … I liked the growth curve I was on.”

Rosen said he wasn’t comfortable with tens of thousands of what he considered “unearned followers” and he didn’t want to forfeit his right to be critical of the SUL. “The harder I looked at it, the more I felt that even people in Twitter would eventually realize that the SUL was a mistake, and they did,” he said. ” … Follower growth was the closest thing they had to a reputation system and they distorted that system. [Twitter founder] Ev [Williams] admitted it was a mistake and contrary to how they want to run Twitter at the [Online News Association] where I was present, in the audience. He said we don’t think we should be making editorial decisions of that kind.”

But despite his reasons for removal, as with Winer I couldn’t help but wonder if there was any hesitancy in his decision. After all, even if the additional tens of thousands of followers were not high in quality, there is still a level of prestige and celebrity that coincides with a large number of followers. Seeing as how Rosen teaches journalism at NYU and has carved out a sub-niche in social media, surely his accomplishments in this medium — including a large follower list — could contribute positively to his career when it comes to salary raises, speaking fees, and other advancements. Were there any regrets?

“The only time I think that is when I am in an argument with someone who has 250,000 followers and I think he or she is very wrong … It’s just: ‘…why does he have a bigger megaphone than I do? Oh, right, Suggested User List.”

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