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The oil industry has put their astroturf and lobbying efforts into overdrive over the last few months, preparing for a bitter fight in the upcoming 2012 presidential election. In addition to their usual work of pushing for increased domestic oil production and the opening of federal lands for oil drilling, the industry is working around the clock to convince lawmakers to sign off on the Keystone XL Pipeline that would transport crude tar sand oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries.

ThinkProgress reporter Lee Fang has helped uncover some of the oil industry’s recent astroturf tactics at townhall meetings across the country. At a separate townhall event in Iowa, Republicans Rick Santorum and Herman Cain were asked questions by “activists” planted by the industry-funded group the Iowa Energy Forum.

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Seems even ExxonMobil is catching the micro-blogging fever on Twitter.

Julie a "Community Evengilist at ExxonMobil Corp." writes:

Hi there, I'm Janet, one of a few Community Evengilist at ExxonMobil Corp. I'm here to answer any of questions from this twitter community."

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One of my jobs here at DeSmogBlog is to keep an eye on emerging Web technologies and models and see if there are applications for this site. One of the newest such applications is Twitter. There's always Wikipedia, but David Lee King has a decent explanation.

Lots of people refer to it as a form of micro-blogging, but I like to call it one's 'status trickle'. Here are a couple of blogs posts specific to how non-profits might use Twitter.

We've started our own Twitter account.