This past weekend’s Jamboree conference was a true showcase for social networking with Twitter and Facebook. Geneabloggers and Thomas MacEntee worked with Jamboree chair Paula Hinkel to set up a Twitter hashtag #scgs09, and twitterings prior to the event suggested that it would be well utilized.
On arrival, tweeters found that a huge video screen had been set up in the foyer of the conference hall to show a projected image of scrolling tweets bearing the Jamboree tag. I was a bit startled the first time I walked into the room and saw my words rotating over the big screen. It really drove home the point to be careful about what I wrote!
At each session I attended, and especially the Blogger Summit, attendees were tweeting ideas and responses throughout the program. During the Summit, the panel members as well as the attendees tweeted comments, creating a kind of “discussion within a discussion.” Our teachers, probably would have called it “whispering” and rapped our hands, but it served a useful purpose of allowing side-conversations to develop without interrupting the main speaker or topic. Some of these comments also came through Facebook, genearating comments from non-attendees as well. I am sure we will here more about some of those topics in the weeks to come.
It quickly became obvious that some folks have a gift for listening while typing, and I was one who relinquished the field to Randy Seaver when it became obvious that he was doing an excellent job of tweet-casting play-by-play action from the Blogger Summit.
What a wonderful tool! I had to leave the Summit early for another appointment, and knew that I could catch up on what I missed by reading Randy’s twitter report later. Wouldn’t similar interaction be great with other kinds of groups? We saw it working this weekend, and felt that using Twitter and Facebook helped share our Jamboree experience with other bloggers not attending the event.
I type 70+ wpm, and I could NOT keep up with Randy's tweets (and Randy "hunts & pecks!"). I just stuck to the "color commentary" since there was no point in reinventing the wheel.
I, too, was extremely surprised to see my tweets appear on the SCGS jumbotron. It was a good lesson in keeping my mouth shut!
Thanks for the info on Visible Tweets, Thomas. I'm sure I can use it somewhere… maybe at the DAR conference next week.
Thanks to both of you for a wonderful conference experience!
Thanks for sharing the tweet tips, Thomas. I'm looking forward to trying Tweetdeck, which seemed to be your favorite tweeting service.
Denise
This is a great summary of how Twitter was leveraged by the geneabloggers at Jamboree.
The program used for projecting the tweets is called http://visibletweets.com/#query=%23scgs09&animation=1“ rel=”nofollow”>Visible Tweets – it is a free website and lets you enter a search term and then select a variety of animations. We used #scgs09 as the search term and it uses http://search.twitter.com/“ rel=”nofollow”>Twitter Search to find the tweets.
Next year's hashtag #scgs10 is already being used and I am sure we'll be using Twitter at Jamboree no matter what iteration Twitter is in at that time.