Acronym

This is an interesting experiment, and I think might be useful for archival purposes, but it sure does seem like a lot of work and it's missing some stuff like the bloggercon, which had some really fantastic takeaways.

Way to make an effort in trying to bring order to chaos. I think it's a good idea that needs further refinement and I too agree with Maddie. As it stands I could see the value for providing some of the content from the sessions but I think what you lose is a lot of the context. Add to that the labor intensive nature of the exercise and I think it's difficult to justify the return on effort especially when one considers Great Ideas is a small-to-mid-size conference and it probably took a fair amount of time. What happens when you run into Annual? With the volume of sessions and tweets - I don't think it would be feasible or sustainable. I wish I had a specific answer or suggestion, but I don't - yet. It is however a good first step. Nice work.

I actually found your reorganization to be rather helpful, as I felt it gave additional context by connecting the tweets with the sessions. Now we just need links to each of the presentations as well to get a well-rounded view.

I understand Dave's concerns about size and time commitments, but what if only the top 10 related tweets were gathered and then a full dump of all hashtagged items was also available in raw form? For people who may not "get" Twitter yet, this is a great way to elevate those comments and feedback to be seen by a larger audience.

Thanks for taking the time to pull those tweets together. It was very helpful as a list of takeaways from attendees for those who couldn't be there.

I wonder if adding additional hashtags for each session or conference track would be valuable. That way you could follow the full stream or just the streams from the sessions that interest you.

@Maddie: Thanks for pointing out that some things are missing--that's an important pointer if we try to do something like this again. We'll look at how "keep"/"don't keep" decisions were made to make sure things like the bloggercon aren't missed again.

@Dave: I definitely agree that a conference like Annual would be a lot more work than this one was! That was why we thought we'd get our feet wet with Great Ideas and see if the idea of doing something like this had any value, before tackling a bigger conference.

I was interested in what you mentioned about context being lost, though: Do you think the raw Twitterstream offers more context? Or should we look at adding some context in some other way (maybe with Mike's idea about linking to presentations, or some other form of short session summary to go along with the Tweets)?

@Mike: Thank you so much for the feedback! I like the idea of making sure the raw Twitterstream is still linked in, for folks who want to see the whole thing. Some people will always prefer the non-boiled-down version.

I wonder, how do people feel about the time sensitivity of something like this? Would a Twitter summary like this be more valuable if it were posted within a few days of a conference, or does that not matter?

Thanks for organizing the tweets! For somebody who didn't attend the conference, this is definitely an easier way to get a sense of the discussions.

I agree with the points made about effort and scalability. I think it makes it clear that twitter is great as a real-time communication tool during conferences, but is less well-suited for communicating before and after events.

From my experience, I've seen that post-conference blogs and forums are great for these types of more lasting conversations after a conference.

@Jeremy: Thank you so much for the suggestion! We've talked about that idea, but we always end up deciding that it would be too many hashtags--Great Ideas alone would have had dozens. Do you think that's too many, or would people enough value in being able to drill down that they would be willing to keep track of them?

@John: That's a really interesting point. I've been noticing a shift among association bloggers that I've been curious to see play out: It used to be that we saw a lot more same-day blogging during a conference or liveblogging during conference sessions. Now a lot of association bloggers seem to Tweet during the actual conference and post to their blogs several days or even weeks later, once they've had a chance to digest what they heard and saw. I wonder if this is leading to more thoughtful blog posts?

I must say, the organization of this content is a fantastic idea and I could only hope to see this trend elsewhere in the future.

I personally kept meaning to sort through conference-related tweets after #tech09 in January but I could never make the time. Sure, Maddie was right in that it does seem like alot of time went into compiling and organizing this information (with even more time most likely needed for the annual conf) but I think having this content in one place will be invaluable for those that want to revisit the thoughts and ideas exchanged via the Twitter platform during the live event.

As for timing, Lisa, it could be said that it would be slightly more beneficial to post an aggregation of these items sooner after conference rather than later but I know that I personally found myself revisiting #tech09 session topics and/or vendor information well into February. As long as the compiled information is available at all (and, might I add, a potential candidate for a contextual Google search result down the line), I wouldn't say it would hurt to delay the posting... if for no other reason than to ensure that it's grouped properly and accompanies links to other conference-related information (e.g., articles, blog postings, PDFs, MP3s, etc.)

RE: hashtags, I suppose I can see the benefit of multiple for the purposes of organization for attendees after-the-fact but, personally, having to follow several dozen hashtags during the event would be burdensome. I think having the one umbrella hashtag is certainly enough... especially if ASAE continues this trend of aggregating the information afterwards.

I'll stop now... that was a bit more verbose than I intended... apologies all around. ;)

Lisa, kudos to you and Summer... I think this is a great idea and it's very well-organized!

Man, I hope this doesn't mean I'm going to have to start doing this :)

I manage the ASCD blog and ran the ASCD Twitter account during our Annual Conference last week (about 8,000 attendees), and we had a real flurry of folks using #ascd09 to code their tweets. I tweeted from sessions and also had an army of bloggers posting on specific sessions: http://ascd.typepad.com/blog/annual_conference/

Occasionally, I'd blog something that compiled a bunch of conference-related resources (http://ascd.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/microblogging-from-the-occc-is-ooc.html), and then relist the link via Twitter.

This helped us sort of collect our thoughts, similar (but not as extensively) to what you've done here. One challenge was folks using #ascd instead of #ascd09. Not a big deal, just something else for us to run Twitter Search on for content, that weekend.

Having wifi in the entire convention center was a huge hit, and really fueled a lot of participation, from folks on site, and off-site virtual attendees.

Re: The Twitterverse will eventually move towards a standard, but right now the appropriate number of hashtags is wide open. Personally, I say more than two is distracting and eats in to valuable space.

Yesterday I learned about a service called LoudTwitter. I haven't tried it, but supposedly it moves tweets from your stream to your blog in one daily batch. Could be worthwhile.

this is very cool. several of us will try live tweeting the AERA conference next week in San Diego
http://www.aera.net/Default.aspx?id=5348

We have set up a wiki
http://aeratweetup.pbwiki.com/

and a twitter stream
http://twitter.com/AERAtweetup

Paul Baker
AERA Communication and Outreach Committee