In the past you used to attend a conference,then a few days later type up and compile the highlights of your notes and perhaps email them to a few colleagues who might be interested. At this weeks Unicom Web 2.0 conference I got a quite shocking introduction to how things have changed.
Firstly I was the only one with a Windows PC I was surrounded by Macs. As I got up to speak, everyone at the front of the room seemed to be typing what I thought at first might be work emails, facebook updates and or finishing their own presentation.
By the time I had finished my talk on ‘the ecology of Web 2.0‘ I really didn’t anticipate or understand what had gone on around me. Suw Charman-Anderson, blogged the whole event and later gave a great, slide free talk on the psychology of email addiction, had almost verbatim transcripts published live, for every speaker. So go to her blog and you can read transctripts for each talk and see the great tips, tricks and technologies we all talked about.
Luis Suarez from IBM however was twittering in order to demonstrate how we can free ourselves from the control of email and his tweme of twitters (don’t you just love the new language) was readily available on the day but search as I might I cannot find it now so perhaps twemes only live for one day like a butterfly.
Luis said in his talk that “once you press publish it was outdated” and in this case that was so true. Twitterers and Bloggers across the world were directly and immediately reading and commenting on the presentations being given using very simple to understand technology but in a far more natural and organically growing way than I had included or anticipated in my talk. We were essentially broadcasting through some of the attendees out into the Web 2.0 world while they added a light touch of context (signification in SenseMaker terms) to the whole proceedings.
Ecology of Knowledge 