Now, the Christian Science Monitor editorial page is calling for Twitter to receive a Nobel Peace Prize. I’m not sure if we agree with giving them that prize — although the Twitter team certainly would be as deserving (if not more) than some recent recipients. However, we did want to share with you the first several paragraphs of the editorial, which are very powerful and on point:

The video gave substance to what seemed so far away. We saw the look in her eyes as they went lifeless. We heard the sounds of her friends and family as they begged her to hold on. And she became the personification of the struggle for democracy in a country where voices for freedom are quelled.

Her name was Neda Agha-Soltan, and without Twitter we might never have known that she lived in Iran, that she dreamed of a free Iran, and that she died in a divided Iran for her dreams.

Neda became the voice of a movement; Twitter became the megaphone. Twitter is a free social-messaging utility. It drove people around the world to pictures, videos, sound bites, and blogs in a true reality show of life, dreams, and death. Last month’s marches for freedom and the violent crackdowns were not only documented but personalized into a story of mythic tragedy.

When traditional journalists were forced to leave the country, Twitter became a window for the world to view hope, heroism, and horror. It became the assignment desk, the reporter, and the producer. And, because of this, Twitter and its creators are worthy of being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize.

As the editorial page states, Twitter was merely a megaphone that allowed the dissemination of the content and voices of protest in Iran.  As such, we disagree that Twitter is the “assignment desk, the reporter, and the producer.”  Those jobs will always belong to the people who produce the content — the brave citizen journalists.

In our opinion, Twitter is akin to the camera, the microphone, the television and the radio.

And we’d rather the Nobel Peace Prize go to these brave citizen journalists — rather than the mere tools they used.

We’ve written about the recent Iranian elections — and how citizens are using new online tools to effectively collect and share their content (photos, videos, twitter posts, etc. of government crackdowns and protests.)  These new tools have been vital to circumventing the government censorship of traditional media to tell the truth about what’s occurring in that country.

So, as we celebrate the Independence Day holiday this weekend, we draw attention to the years leading up to July 4, 1776 — and how the dawn of new content tools allowed ordinary citizens to communicate, protest their government and disseminate unique, compelling content that competed with the government-run press.

In fact, up until about prior to the American Revolution, there was only one newspaper in all of Virginia.  That paper was heavily subsidized by the royals and, as such, was a de facto government mouthpiece.

As this research paper (“Thomas Jefferson and the Originals of Newspaper Competition in Pre-Revolutionary Virginia”) points out, the dawn of the Stamp Act changed all that.  This new law not only hurt the taxpayers economically, it also served to silence opposition voices by making it tougher and more expensive to produce printed materials.

So — a number of enterprising Virginians decided to bring in their own newspaper to compete with the government mouthpiece.  The research paper mentioned above points out:

Great changes came to the printing business in Virginia in 1765. About the time that Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a second printer was encouraged to open another shop in Williamsburg, marking the beginnings of competition in that field. This was an important watershed for the culture and government of the colony, for it signified a shift in the power structure. Control of public messages began to relocate from the royal government to the consumer marketplace. This was a transformation that had a major impact on civic discourse in the colony.

And Thomas Jefferson himself wrote:

“Until the beginning of our revolutionary dispute, we had but one press, and that having the whole business of the government, and no competitor for public favor, nothing disagreeable to the governor could be got into it. We procured Rind to come from Maryland to publish a free paper.”

In short, oppressive governments have always realized that truthful content is a deadly weapon.  So, as in the cases of pre-revolutionary Britain and modern day Iran, these governments moved to shut down the ability to disseminate this content.

And, as in the cases of the Virginian and Iranian revolutionaries — the citizens simply found ways to disseminate their content, anyway.

At first glance, there seems a world of difference betwee the Virginians’ purchase of a second printing press — and the Iranians’ use of YouTube, Twitter and FriendFeed.  But, while the technology is different — the end result is the same:  the effective production and dissemination of unique, compelling content.

Thanks to Mashable, we’ve learned that the Web Ecology Project has published a detailed analysis of The Iranian Election on Twitter — and the findings are pretty remarkable:

• From 7 June 2009 until the time of publication (26 June 2009), we have recorded 2,024,166 tweets about the election in Iran.
• Approximately 480,000 users have contributed to this conversation alone.
• 59.3% of users tweet just once, and these users contribute 14.1% of the total number.
• The top 10% of users in our study account for 65.5% of total tweets.
• 1 in 4 tweets about Iran is a retweet of another user’s content.

A firsthand look at the power of this social media tool in terms of community, news dissemination, content sharing, discussion and debate.  As we’ve stated before, also the latest case study of how online tools are increasingly allowing citizen journalists to break the biggest stories of the day — and how even the traditional media is becoming increasingly reliant on this user-generated content for their news reports.