Friday, March 13, 2009

Twitter for Conference Back-Channel Chat










  1. Anonymous9:34 PM

    have you tried or or Woudl htey hold your prolific tweets?

  2. Anonymous4:23 PM

    Hey Steve, since you used a ":" symbol on all the entries, you can add a couple of regex filters to split the session info from the note, which eliminates the duplication. See sample at

  3. Anonymous2:53 PM

    Thanks for the NetVibes suggestion. I think having multiple accounts is a great idea and works for Facebook as well.

  4. I love the multiple accounts idea...but am wondering, why not just blog your notes and post them right after? This isn't breaking news or life-threatening information that needs to be conveyed.

    I do enjoy reading people's conference tweets, but it can be so out of context. Maybe it's best to blog them all in one doc and publish without going through all this rigamarole. It misses that just-in-time feel of attendance. But you could tweet certain things (e.g., questions) and blog the rest.

  5. @cammy:

    The value of posting to twitter isn't readily apparent when only one person is actively doing so at a conference, but when multiple people are, and the conference is timely, using the site with a specified hash tag would give you real-time information about what's being said at a conference.

    That may be more valuable around an event where you want to know what is happening right at the moment.

  6. I see the value in conf tweeting, absolutely. I'm just thinking do more selective tweeting and keep the full notes to a blog post?

  7. @Cammy: Yes, I think I agree, but I'm not sure yet. Like a lot of these things, it's hard to know what will be helpful until you try them out and then see what happens. I don't like both tweeting and taking notes, so doing this worked for me, but I can imagine it might be bothersome if several people in a "channel" were doing it... :)

  8. Absolutely! Well keep us posted re: your adventures in conference tweeting. It's such new territory.

  9. great post. i haven't experimented with twitter's RSS as yet. Should do it sometime soon.

  10. Good post! I have just finished using Twitter for backchannel in my classroom. Check it out!

  11. @jared. Thanks for the link. Fascinating to read about that experience.

  12. Two Days ago a Keynote speaker at a conference about Connectivity and Social Media was heckled by twitter users, so much so that it became a trending topic! see

