Not long ago I was talking about Twitter, and how it seems to have grown up. I said that it’s no longer about telling people what you had for breakfast, but has turned into a meaningful communication tool.
Web 3.0, Thursday
In a similar vein, I was at a conference on Thursday and Friday, the Internet Librarian International. Because my company was a sponsor, we got a speaking slot, and I was the one who stepped up to the plate. Now, the organizers had asked us, even though we were sponsors, not to do too much of the corporate hard sell. This was fine by me, and I planned to give a typical rpg ramble.
As it turns out, I got a fair bit of positive reaction from the organizers and other people: the other sponsors did talk about themselves, and I only mentioned what we are doing in passing. I was also far more interesting than the guy I shared a session with (which wouldn’t have been difficult).
So, Twitter. Last year at the blogging conference, we used Friendfeed to comment on the sessions as they were happening (sorry, Eva). This year we used Twitter, and if you’re anything like a regular twit(terer) you’ll notice hashtags from conferences popping up all over the shop. Twitter is the new Friendfeed, at least when it comes to conferences.
ILI 2009 was no different (even if there was a plethora of hashtags —although given our experience of the organization I’m not surprised). The beauty of Twitter is not in the execrable interfaces for it, but in the search mechanisms that exist. It’s easy to twitter, and it’s even easier to stick the search terms for a particular topic into an RSS feed and keep up to date—or even to go back a few days later and see what was said about your own talk.
Almost Web 3.0. Almost.
And then, while I was sat with Tom (our sales bloke) at lunchtime yesterday, merrily twittering on my iPhone*, he asked me whether anyone was paying attention to the talks or if we weren’t all just too busy twittering. Then it struck me, just as that famous study (which I can’t be arsed to go and look up right now) showed that doodlers can recall more of seminars than non-doodlers, so twitterers probably pay more attention than those who don’t (and certainly more than those who are simply checking email). See, if you’re twittering about the talk, you are almost by definition paying attention. Even you you have to multi-task to do so. For me, at least, I have never felt the slow creep of the heavy eyelids while I have been tweeting and reading tweets in a talk.
Maybe we should make it compulsory.
rpg, Thursday
I’d be interested to hear what other people think about this. Do you think that Twitter could actually take the place of conference notes, for example? Do you go back and check tweets post hoc to remind you of what was said? Are hashtags and search the ultimate in conference evolution? Most importantly, does Twitter keep you awake in conferences?
(And I’ll post a link to the YouTube vids once the carrier pigeons have made it from Sarf of the Riva.)
bq. * I could have used my laptop at this stage, except we were showing a flash demo of the existing f1000 site, and the work Windows machine was dying, horribly. My MacBook Pro came to the rescue, admirably. Yay for a decent operating system, eh?
bq. Do you think that Twitter could actually take the place of conference notes?
Not could, does.
Yes, though you have to do it quick and archive it somehow otherwise in 10 days time all is lost.
I have never had the problem of not being able to stay awake in conferences. Cough.
What’s your secret, Karen? (And thanks for the responses)
LOL Richard, last year we commented just the opposite about solo 09 I was surprised that the conversation about the conference was going on in friendfeed. I guess it’s all about where your audience is. Twitter has grown so much, that it is pretty hard not to find an audience to discuss your conference with there. The plethora of mobile apps for twitter helps at conferences too, easy to do on an iphone/ WAP phones/ netbooks and the 140 chrs helps to discipline you into short erudite comments rather than live blogging the entire event, which is more what can happen on FriendFeed. I usually use tweetdeck on the iTouch for conferences, allows you to add a column for a search and I like the interface.
I’ve been using twitter to keep me awake in conferences since I attended an OU workshop last year drbadgr and sociallearn the hardest thing to is self censor when you are deathly bored, the speaker is dire and it feels like you haven’t had a cup of tea for weeks! Sometimes it is worth trying to get twitterfall on the main screen at a conference, there was almost a walk out at ALTC this year when the crowd of eLearning technologists had to suffer watching two people chat in elluminate during the keynotes when there were stacks of people in the audience tweeting!
Ha ha! I did actually put up the TwitterFall on screen during Solo09.
I’m not convinced the twitter chat is always ‘erudite’, but it can be entertaining. Especially when you disagree violently with the keynote speaker cough. And it’s really useful to have a
iPhonemobile device when the wireless in the hotel is complete pants doublecough.When I take notes at conferences I usually draw a lot of pictures and graphs, and I produce reams of text. I don’t see my pen and paper notebook being replaced anytime soon.
Ok, you’ve done it – finally joined twitter!!
I’m not sure I’m good enough at multi-tasking to twitter during a conference talk but I can see that it would make you pay attention, especially since you have to distil your thoughts into tweets and not just write everything/anything the speaker is saying.
I guess the important thing is to find what works for you. I used to take loads of notes but found it impossible to search them (I need an apple-f for my notebook) or, indeed, to read my own writing. There might be a reason for that.
Hi Sam! Glad to see you’ve joined the Dark Side, and will be following your career with interest…
Plethora of hashtags? Plague of hashtags more like. By creating sub-tags for each talk/session, some of the aggregation goodness is lost. A FriendFeed group is a bundle of hashtags, but threaded, and all in one place. I’m still trying to work out what the relationships are between Twitter and Friendfeed for capturing live events, such as conferences (or experiments, for that matter).
Maybe you should talk to Eva about that. AJ.
Yeah, I’m not at all convinced about sub-tags, unless they’re associated with the major tag too, but then that’s 8 characters right there…
I actually don’t like Twitter OR friendfeed for conference discussions. On Twitter people have contacts who have nothing to do with the conference, and don’t WANT anything to do with the conference but have to sit through the agony of seeing out of context scribbles about it all day long. On FriendFeed (and actually probably Twitter too) the contributions by one person are removed from ALL places on FF as soon as they delete their account – it’s not as permanent as people say it is. Plus, the most annoying web 2.0 users have their Twitter set up to barf out everything they type on FF, and then you STILL get their randomness on Twitter all day, but even more out of context because you can’t immediately see what they’re replying to.
You know what would work well for threaded archivable discussions of conferences that don’t annoy your friends-who-don’t-care?
Message boards.
What is wrong with good old fashioned message boards? Just because T/FF are newer doesn’t mean they’re always better.
Does someone need a hug?
My website host is still down. And now I am, too, as a result.
OK folks, let’s show Eva the power of Web 2.723 by saying how much we love her.
2.723 =)
But seriously: message boards are the answer if the question is “How can be use the threaded forum discussions on FriendFeed to talk about conferences without annoying the hell out of people by forcing conference updates into Facebook and Twitter and deadling with people replying on Twitter to a question we asked on FriendFeed?”
Combined with Slideshare/YouTube, I don’t see what’s wrong with just an organized forum.
be = we
And that reminds me: FriendFeed also lets you edit your comments. Good for typo-fixing, bad for pretending to be a go-to place for archived conference discussions as they happened. Opportunity for fraud abound.
Yeah, we know FriendFeed is pants. It’s so difficult to find stuff: more web 1.9 than web 2, actually.
Bulletin boards are a possibility (Usenet, anyone?). To be honest, I think much of the problem stems from being unable (AFAIK) to block Tweets on hashtag.
Where Twitter (and, actually, FF) has win is one sign-up gets you everything. Can you imagine having a different board/forum for each conference you’re interested in. The aggregation schtick is a big bonus. I can keep an eye on things I didn’t know about yet am interested in relatively hassle-free.
I’ve blogged about this a little bit more and embedded the videos at my f1000 blog.
Can you imagine having a different board/forum for each conference you’re interested in.
No. I’m imagining something that only hosts conference discussions. You sign up once, and you can use it for all the conferences you attend or want to follow. Subscribe to the ones you’re interested in, follow some people who attend conferences you’re interested in. Conference organizers get to start the threads for each session, so there is one official place to talk about stuff. They can set a thread to public if everyone in the world can follow, or choose to show it only to people with registered accounts, or to people who are actually at the conference, or (if a speaker insists) they can indicate there that it’s not open for discussion.
And I don’t mean to use an existing place to do this, I mean a new thing. A place just for conference notes, not for notes in general or talking to your friends.
I imagine something like this would kick off at tech (un)conferences, in collaboration with the conference organizers, leak over to bioinformatics, and eventually reach “regular” science conferences.
There’s clearly a market for a place for live conference notes, and you can work with what people made available for other uses (Twitter, FF, Google Wave) but I think there are some very specific needs/wants for conference organizers that would benefit from a dedicated service just for conferences. (Analogy: You can also consistently use napkins to take notes, and argue that it works fine, and that some great ideas were born on napkins, but napkins weren’t meant for writing on, and most people prefer notebooks if given a choice.)
If someone steals this, and runs with it, I’d be flattered. Credit please, though =)
Um Eva, that’s a brilliant idea, but
why don’t you do it? I’d be willing to stump something up for the hosting.
I don’t know how! I don’t have the business sense or tech knowledge. I only do PR.
FriendFeed has threaded discussions, and a dedicated message board for conferences would be great, but Twitter just works and everybody seems to be using it. My goal for future conferences (Science Online London 2010?) would be more feedback for the speakers, e.g. by projecting the tweets with the conference hashtag on a second screen. We did that briefly at Science Online London 2009, but none of the speakers really paid attention (remember the iPhone alarm that didn’t go off?).
Eva, it really does sound like a great idea. Do you have a techie friend who could help you set it up? You can deal with the business side later, when you have something up that you can actually show to people.
Of course, you would have to build in a feature that blocks people from automatically sending their conference notes to Twitter AND Facebook AND so on.
Oh gods, that bloody iPhone alarm. It was there in the front row, all the tweets on TwitterFall were shouting about it, and no one claimed it!
(did the people in 2nd Life manage to see the tweets, btw?)
This is old and not really up to date as a live-blogging tool, but is a beginning, a base that can be built upon.
You’re all wrong! Obviously, the answer is Google Wave! :p)
Now all we have to do is figure out what the question is!
I just started watching the video of this session elsewhere, and now I realize who that ape is on the slide in the second image. I had to see it and hear “the librarian” at the same time to figure out who it was. I’ve only ever read the books, so I didn’t recognize him from a picture without context. (I’d feel embarrassed, if I hadn’t just admitted to reading books.)
@AJ laugh!
I’m surprised that slide didn’t get as much as a titter as Dr Evil did, Eva.
Interestingly I’ve been thinking about this this afternoon and trying to figure out how Wave might work to do what Eva is proposing in reverse. Pull all the commentary around a talk back into one place, and possibly at a later stage push it back so that people are aware of it. The problem with any new site is that it will struggle to get people to come to it. You’ve got to go to where people are, not expect them to come to you, and that means aggregating after the fact rather than pulling in beforehand. However all that said, a Wave could act as the gathering point for those who are wanting to go to a separate place while simultaneously bringing all the external content to them.
I think I can see how to pull content back from twitter and from frienfeed. Obviously the talk slides and any video can go in – though I need to get a downloadable/embeddable version of the Leicester video to do that. I’ve got the slides inserted into a Wave for the Newcastle talk and that seems to work. Just need a bit of actual doing and hacking to pull it into place I think.
So, Cameron, you’ve actually found a use for Wave? Have I got that right?
But Cameron, isn’t that what FriendFeed originally set out to do? Gathering info from different places?
I’ve found a bunch Grant, might even let you in on them if you play nice 🙂
Eva: Kind of. What Friendfeed does is aggregate a person’s activity from a range of sites. It was never terribly good at aggregating stuff about a specific subject together from an arbitrary set of services. Where we’ve used it effectively at conferences it has acted more as a message board than an aggregator and the pulling of twitter into the same room never really worked.
What I was thinking was that Wave, as is, provides the kind of message board that you talked about above, plus uou can have the slides and the video, but on top of that would let you bring in and insert other related activity from e.g. Twitter/Friendfeed/Blogs whatever and maybe even insert it in context (less sure about how that would work in practice). But in any case it might be the best of both worlds – a separate space for those who want it, and centralisation for conference organizers, as well as aggregation of more diffuse content, into the same space.
Just playing around a bit at the moment with some of the media that came out of my talks last week to see what I can put together. Struggling a little with getting stuff out of Twitter at the moment but I think I’ve nearly got that sorted. At least I’ve managed to archive one talk’s worth anyway…
Ooh, tempting offer, Cameron. Like I don’t have enough distractions!
Killer app. That’s what we need.