Conferences Are All a Twitter: Live blogging, tweets help spread the joy of events

Conference season is upon us. But school and library budgets being what they are, funding for travel is scarce these days. But a growing trend toward bringing these events online makes it easier than ever to attend sessions virtually and even join in the rich conversations that make conferences so valuable. And if you’re able to attend such an event in person, sharing your experiences in real time with colleagues back home further justifies the expense of sending you there.

The recent SLJ Leadership Summit exemplified how to take a conference online using a wide variety of free technology tools, from Twitter and Flickr to CoverItLive (CIL). A few behind-the-scenes tricks helped make the online portion of the summit so successful. Most important, perhaps, was a team of online facilitators who volunteered to help coordinate and seed the coverage. Also key was the occasional display of the so-called back channel of online discussion on the main presentation screens during keynotes. This reminded people in the room that they, too, could join the conversation there as well as contribute to the live coverage. Attendees saw firsthand how the chat stream could be used to ask questions or follow links to content mentioned by the speaker.

If you’re looking to get started with this, you’ll need to create a hashtag, which will identify and link together all related tweets, photos, blog posts, and other Web content. Hashtags—a taxonomy term prefaced by a “#”—should be brief, unique, and time specific, as in #sljsummit09. Add a hashtag to any Twitter post and it will appear in a search list of other tweets with the same tag. In addition to hashtags, Twitter’s short format and ease of use make it a natural fit for documenting a conference. Sound bites and other snippets from event sessions make perfect tweets and engage virtual attendees.

Another tool for extending presentations beyond the four walls is CIL. The free service enables you to live blog sessions, presented in a constantly updated window of scrolling comments. A designated CIL administrator can allow multiple authors to post to the content stream and moderate comments from other contributors. Conference organizers can tap a volunteer to manage this, or attendees can set up their own CIL event to provide real-time coverage of a critical keynote to colleagues back at the office.

You can keep tabs this way throughout the American Association of School Librarians national conference this month; just follow the #aasl09 hashtag online. In addition, AASL will provide video and audio streams on the bThere site. So whether you’re in attendance or ensconced in your library, you can still take part in the show.