Mark’s Cheeky Posterous

I'm not opposed to a limited amount of live tweeting of points that might be particularly salient or groundbreaking in the eyes of the intended audience, but I otherwise agree that there are far better media than Twitter for relaying and discussing happenings at conferences.

With the sheer number of interesting conferences being reported on through social media, I also find it hard to simply keep track of what conferences are being tweeted. There are lots of hashtags floating around with the particular conference they represent not always being very obvious. I'd like to see better use made of hashtag registries to help readers avoid digging through piles of tweets using a particular hashtag to figure out what it represents.

Thanks Roger. Sure, I don't think live-tweeting should be banned or anything. I agree about something like a hashtag registry. I also think that if people want their words to count more, they should use a better medium for getting them across; if no one's reading your live tweets, do they make a sound?

I read your post yesterday and had to sleep on it to decide my stance. I agree that one could be much more creative about the way they broadcast themselves at events. Event generated content has many roles. Just a few:

-Providing information to others inside/outside the event
-Creating opportunities for self branding
-Finding new relationships inside/outside the event
-promoting the event itself
-promoting services or products related to the event

I'm far from an expert, but those are the things in my mind if I attend an event. One can also create some of the same content roles by just listening to the event through social media and not actually attending.

Your post made me re-think a couple of of things about my past strategy. First, you are spot on about engaging with info and people around you. Being there has a huge benefit, and you give that up if you don't interact. Second, if your online connections are diverse you are not providing value to many folks through twitter.

Following the logic in your post. I might add things like focused blog posts and more strategic twitter use to my strategy. It would also be interesting to bundle content together through live blogging the event. I might try to keep a posterous post open and combine this with a few tweets. Add some self created and borrowed video and you have a powerful combination. This would have been great during some of the sessions from last weeks Web 2.0 conference, had I been there.

I think shared note taking would be more valuable. People jot down notes in, say, a google doc or wave, on the fly. People who are looking for the groundbreaking piece of news can sift through the stream. When the dust settles people could go back, edit their notes, clean repetitions, add commentary, find consensus or note differences of opinion. A shared effort would go from the immediate twitter-like, low quality bits to, potentially, proceeding quality write ups. Somebody just has to say: we deserve better than Twitter. Writing is so much more than that.