[LINK] The Battle of the Conferences.

[Jan Whitaker]

At 11:29 PM 7/05/2009, Sylvano wrote:
> > My contention is - only if you know the people tweeting/twittering
>
>Interesting.  My initial foray into twitter is more like the experience of a
>large party with lots of strangers, some acquaintances and a couple 
>of friends
>mingling, rather than a relaxed dinner party with close friends.

yesterday was my first twitter experience. It reminded me of IRC or 
group chat, nothing more. The code conventions are different and I 
never figured them out. There is a bit of threading of conversations, 
which I found a bit intrusive. At least in IRC I can have a private 
convo with a participant and it's not revealed to the group as a whole.

When I saw a familiar name in the Publicsphere twitter, I smiled. But 
for yesterday's group, there were too many nicknames. Some folks used 
their real names, but most didn't. And many of them were speakers in 
the conference! If you didn't know that, you could really put your 
foot in your mouth [or through your keyboard??].

I was tempted to sign up to twitter so I could get in the game, but I 
found keeping attention on the video hard enough with the extra 
channel running at the same time.


>As you move about looking for people, you listen to snippets of conversations
>here and there, being bored by some and being drawn to others.  Occasionally
>you find that you stop to chat with someone and decide to move away to a
>quieter corner away from the music and babble to have a more solid 
>chin wag on
>some topic of mutual interest.

Possibly if you are looking at the whole of twitter. But when you're 
only in one room [thread? stream? what's the word? topic?], everyone 
in that room sees your conversation.

After having this first experience, I can see why the messages are 
short. The number of people in a thread/stream/topic could overwhelm 
if everyone wrote long entries. Multiple short entries real time at 
least keep them on the screen long enough to read them. Twitter also 
requires an intentional refresh, unlike IRC or Skype chat that feeds 
updates automatically and keeps things going in real time. I had one 
of those last night of about 10 people, but only a handful were 
writing much in time bursts, much like the way a meeting around a 
conference table works. There are those who speak more than others 
because they have information for or need information from the others.

I wonder if there was a Live-blogger for the big bucks conference???? 
I've found those documentaries useful if there is no live feed or I 
can't attend in person. LB seems to be used more often in major 
events in the US. I saw it a lot throughout the election last year.

Jan



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

_ __________________ _