The half-life on zinging Twitter ran out about three days after the microblog's conception, yet the users of the site keep managing to find ways to shoot themselves in the foot. Last week there was The Rocky Mountain News giving minutia updates on the funeral of a child shooting victim, now it's Al Gore's Current TV trying to cash in on the zeitgeist by combining it with blogger's other favorite activity, armchair politicking.

During the debates, the indie network will broadcast viewer-created "tweets," in as close to real time as the monitor lags allow. Cute idea, and it certainly fits into the Blog the Vote phenomenon that engulfed the conventions this year. But while Current TV CEO Joel Hyatt "lamented the limiting nature of debate coverage, populated by experts with axes to grind and predictable partisan arguments to make," you end up wondering: Who does he think Al Gore's desperate network appeals to? Or Twitter's?

Not that there is anything with appealing to a certain technocrati demographic, but it's silly to pretend that you're dealing with a "nonpartisan" community when there is currently a controversy raging on over whether or not the GOP candidate knows how to work a computer.