Over this past weekend, I watched tweets from the popular Gov 2.0 Camp LA with some interest. I had originally planned on attending in person, but with too much happening on many fronts this month I opted to watch this one from afar (Note: both Microsoft and O'Reilly Media were sponsors of the event), mainly by following the hashtag #Gov20LA on Twitter.

I was a bit disappointed in the live tweeting. Not because the content of the conference wasn't good (people's comments suggested that a lot of it was in fact high-quality), but because the content of the TWEETS wasn't good. The high quality of some of the talks was not adequately captured in the tweetstream.

While a lot of lip service is given to live-tweeting events to involve a greater community in a local event, I think that live-tweeting events is dying, nearly useless practice. This is for at least three reasons.

 

One, it's confusing. A bunch of people all tweet the same thing, clogging up the stream. People tweet or re-tweet on time-delays, further making things confusing. Sometimes people discuss a topic or a point with a hashtag, but because it's not easy to thread the discussions (a la Facebook or Friendfeed, for example), it's all you can do to track what's actually happening. People are still tweeting about the last talk when the next one is halfway done.

Two, it is the wrong size medium for the message. In my post, A Talk Is Longer Than a Tweet, I wrote about this more at length. The bottom line is that it's often very hard to capture the magic of a talk in a series of 140 character bites. It's even harder if you're not a strong writer. Solution: Use a tool like Posterous to capture the highlights in say 300 words, and then tweet a link to the post to add more value (here's a good example).

Three, text might be the wrong medium entirely. Some people just have an essence that's hard to describe in text. Imagine trying to live-tweet a Guns N Roses concert for a second. A tweet that says "Welcome to the jungle, we like fun and games." somehow doesn't really grab you like the actual song does. Solution: Maybe people should be recording clips of the talks and editing them down for a later post on Posterous, Tumblr, YouTube or something else, or get back to live-streaming on Qik. (Note: There was a popular live-video stream from some of the event.)

Content is the name of the game. If you're not putting out the best content, people tune you out. I tuned out the tweetstream from Gov 2.0 Camp LA relatively quickly each time I tried, not because the event wasn't good, but because many attendees who were tweeting largely couldn't convey the essence of that goodness to the Web with any consistency.

What I'd like to start seeing more of at many events is designated live-bloggers (this is not unheard of but it isn't really common, either). A designated Twitter account, Facebook wall, and so forth is set up around an event, and for every talk a short blog summarizing its essence is posted through Posterous. Photos (there was a cool Gov 2.0 Camp LA photo pool), videos, and other content are easily integrated, and the content is almost real-time. That sure would be a valuable innovation for event planners to consider for the larger community not at the actual events.

Ultimately, Gov 2.0 Camp LA was an example of how to use many forms of media to tell a story, and a success for the greater community. Many other events that I attend, particularly in the government space, cannot claim the same success, however. What's interesting to me is that this is not a technology problem - many people have smartphones, cameras, and laptops at these events - but rather a human problem.

Somewhat tangentially, but regarding changing the mindset of an organization to a more innovative one, this is an excellent video from Harvard Business.

Bringing in new voices, new techniques, and new ideas seems to be the key to the human side of innovation in large groups. So if you're at a Government 2.0 or other kind of event, and you don't think that the tweetstream is sufficient to tell the story to the larger community, consider live-blogging, posting photos, or even live streaming from your laptop. You may just start being lethally generous.

Note: I accidentially posted an earlier, rough draft of this post on the Web, and subsequently deleted it to be replaced by this final draft.