I have a Twitter account, although I'm not a very good user of it. I only really have it set up to power an RSS feed on my blog, and I don't update it regularly (about once a week if you are lucky) and my tweets are always pretty bland and uninteresting. So I have to confess, I've never really grasped the internal architecture of twitter and how people interact with each other through the service. Very few people have asked to follow my tweets (and if you read them, you'd know why... Nick is "Writing.... very slowly" and "about to start teaching" being two of the more interesting posts).

But today something really strange happened. Suddenly I became very popular indeed - and with a very unlikely group of people. At nine o'clock this morning, RonPaul33 asked to follow me. Intrigued, I looked at his page - it just seemed to lead to lots and lots and lots of articles on Ron Paul. I had no idea what this was - something from the Ron Paul campaign? Enterprising amateur supporters? An elaborate form of spam? And I certainly had no idea why they had decided to pick on me.

But it didn't stop there. BillRichardson4 (12:02), JohnEdwards54 (14:02), RudyGiuliani32 (14:02), JohnMcCain43 (14:03), MikeHuckabee47 (15:04), TommyThompson43 (15:04), and HillaryClinton5 (19:01) all said they wanted to follow my twitter feed. So what on earth is going on? I suspect it is not that I have become hot property in the battle for the White House. Besides, the feeds certainly aren't official, as this is the real John Edwards twitter RSS.

I would suspect some kind of scam, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it could be or how anyone might be benefiting. And the pages with links to news stories on them look fairly genuine. I suppose it is possible that it is a group of highly competitive amateurs who monitor each other, and when they saw RonPaul33 had contacted me they all followed suit. But that explanation seems pretty far-fetched.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what is going on?