A VC - Latest Comments in If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

JeffreyJDavis — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:46:15 -0000

Great post Fred and nice approach to encouraging input. Not sure what it says about today's SM driven society, but some people are probably more comfortable posting a Tweet publicly for the world to see then speaking up verbally in a room with 40 or 50 people.

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

rosevibe — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:08:17 -0000

I think twitter is a brilliant tool for many things - if used wisely.

having it positioned so all can see helps; danah boyds recent speaker experience shows that:

http://www.zephoria.org/tho...

I love twitter as a way of following events that I can't attend but it seems to work best in the way you mention if the event is a small one - the larger the event the more likely mob rule and snarky conversations will overtake the relevant comments and discussions - alongside the 'self promotion' that people keep mentioning in the comments here.

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

mbrosen — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:00:31 -0000

"Teaching With Tweetdeck"

Neat.

http://tweetdeck.posterous....

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

fredwilson — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 06:42:09 -0000

There were only three or four people out of 40 doing that

It was fine

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

Troy Steele — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:09:03 -0000

Don't you guys find it distracting talking to people tapping away on a keyboard. It seems rather 'rude' to me.

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

FlavioGomes — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:27:38 -0000

A read this from a Musician\Author that intrigued me:

"Recently I read an article in the New York Times about an emerging trend called Slow Blogging. Said to be inspired by the Slow Food movement in Europe, which was born as a backlash against fast food and to celebrate the joys and rewards of growing and preparing the finest food possible, Slow Blogging (loathsome word, but we seem to be stuck with it) is likewise the antithesis to the rapid-fire, semi-literate, compulsive texting that is so prevalent these days (anyone feeling too optimistic about human nature need only read the comments that follow any online news story — shockingly, appallingly ignorant and vicious!). By definition, Slow Bloggers do not hack out quick-and-dirty opinions, but rather deliberately take their time in observing their subjects, whether a morning walk in the woods or a workplace epiphany, then frame those moments in words as artfully as they can."

As some one who is just beginning to explore (and really digging BTW!!) Twitter, the above gave me pause.

Just sayin

Flavio

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

Steven Egan — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:39:24 -0000

I wish I had known about this part of the event, beforehand. It would have been a blast to be a part of the action.

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

fredwilson — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:21:10 -0000

Hmm, that part about women vs men is interesting

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

bpmbpm — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:51:29 -0000

I agree. This thread reminds me of a research study I co-authored during my graduate school internship. This was in 2000 and we wondered about the enabling effects wireless devices could have in face-to-face meetings. We set up a study that was focused on a brainstorming and voting task, and we weighted it to disadvantage one segment of the group (women) by outnumbering them in the group and by having the task be male-oriented (naming and then voting on the winning names for a series of new video games). People were told to discuss the task, but they were instructed to submit names and votes electronically, ostensibly to make sure all ideas were captured accurately. So there was a combination of face-to-face and wireless activity (everyone could see what everyone else submitted as they submitted it, very much like your Twitter stream). We set up the wireless devices to enable anonymous contributions for one session and then submissions that had peoples' names attached to them for another. The study was pretty remarkable in that when women were anonymous they contributed more ideas and had more of their ideas voted as the best. To us it proved the efficacy of a tool like this in face-to-face communication, especially when you had a group with built-in status differences (peers vs. bosses, etc.).

By the way, Fred, I'm a huge fan of this blog. Thanks so much for all you put into it.

Brenda

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

gregory — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:41:24 -0000

Projecting tweets worked great for us at the Shorty Awards too. We built an interface that automatically updates with the latest tweets about Shorty at http://shortyawards.com/tic... and projected it on the big screen during the event. It's not as compelling now that the awards are over, but you can view it in action on the video embed here: http://shortyawards.com/.

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

Yaron Samid — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:21:54 -0000

Cool, will try the former. Will look awesome on the big screen.

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

fredwilson — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:16:48 -0000

Either use a client like tweetdeck or have someone at the computer hit the refresh button

We did the latter

It would sure be great if it did auto refresh like stocktwits does

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

Yaron Samid — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:53:11 -0000

Hey Fred,

I've got an www.NYVideo.org event tonight with over 500 members attending. I want to give this a try but how do you get the hash stream to update/refresh automatically?

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

ppearlman — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:19:34 -0000

great idea fred! we must do this at lindzonpalooza.

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

hypermark — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:26:31 -0000

Out of interest, who is trying to formally define hashtags? I am with you on community definition but there is a line between being completely ad hoc and having community driven recognition systems.

Granted, twitter is moving to provide some of this data from a trending perspective but what is needed are more reliable contextual framing mechanisms so: a) it is easier to plug into conversational threads and b) as contexts become anchored they persist beyond NOW.

While there are spam considerations to reliability of hashtag persistency, the 140 character limits mitigates over use by legitimate users, I think.

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

Evert Bopp — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:50:34 -0000

Twitter as a backchannel has been the norm at most Irish Technology (related) conferences for over a year. Screens with Twitterstreams are also popping up all over the place.
It greatly improves the interactivity of conferences and "forces" a speaker to be more on their toes.
It alos allows people that cannot attend to follow the events and even post questions to the speaker or the crowd.
A relative new development is that Twitter is being used for live comments-streams on TV shows. Have a look for the #ddire hashtag and you will see what I mean.

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

Michael Lewkowitz — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:29:53 -0000

If hashtags become owned like accounts I think they will have lost a lot of their value. That they live and die through community is a big part of their magic. There are a number of services that are trying to 'define' hashtags - really we just need to better ways to get contextual summary faster.

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

Michael Lewkowitz — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:27:04 -0000

Funny you should use that 'glyph'. Will be launching something this week that you might be able to use for what you want to experiment with. I'm @igniter on twitter if you want to connect.

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

fredwilson — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:48:09 -0000

It does

Have you ever put stocktwits on a big screen with a bunch of people in the
room?

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

fredwilson — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:46:08 -0000

I love Rodney in Back To School

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

kenberger — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:53:41 -0000

Here in Asia (where I've been for the last month), I see the potential to be even more impactful.

There are many here who would never make a comment via their mouths in public, but typing things out, particularly via a handle or avatar, can really empower a voice.

It's really interesting studying how Twitter and other social/communication services are used here.

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

ppearlman — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:43:48 -0000

we do this every single weekday of the year minus a few holidays from 930am to 4pm straight with thousands of people giving their takes and cash money on the line. ...and it rocks!

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

Pete Warden — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:06:55 -0000

Eric's absolutely right, the Eventvue's twitter feed for Defrag was incredibly useful. It sparked a lot of conversations that would have never happened otherwise, both online and face-to-face.

One under-appreciated advantage of using Twitter at events is discovering completely new people. Like you say Fred, there's often less aggressive or well-known voices who would normally be drowned out that have interesting things to add. You can find them by keeping a close eye on the feed or using Twitter's raw search; I've also built tools to visualize the communities that form around concepts. Here's the network for #hackedu
http://twitter.mailana.com/...

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

mbrosen — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:04:44 -0000

Is there at all a concern regarding 'noise' or someone from the public being too 'loud', misinforming, contradictory, etc.?

How to filter noise?

Any concern from professors that they might lose "control" of the discussion?

Think: Rodney Dangerfield in 'Back to School'

http://www.script-o-rama.co...

Search for 'widgets'

;-)

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

fredwilson — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:37:23 -0000

I'd like to experiment too. There are a number of educators doing just that