Nearly drowned: Tweeting at BreakNECC speed
This is the third day of NECC, and I haven’t even been to my blog. This year the conference has been a Tweetfest…people discovering the power of sitting in sessions “tweeting” out commentary, feedback, arguments, links, and tweetlogs of the session proceedings to other in the room, elsewhere, and nowhere. I am waiting for another session to start as I begin this post, and I have joined the #necc09 tweeters off and on, therefore have not “blogged” more about the sessions.
And those of you not here ask, “who cares?” I tell you about this as another example of the swimmers’ obligation.
My BreakNECC tweeting has been another opportunity for the swimmers to give swimming lessons to others. A novice backchanneler myself, I helped three people install and configure Tweetdeck (“Here, just hold onto the side and kick…get a feel for the water.”). I watched the tweets going by and adjusted my technique—watching those swimmers more expert than I. Will I stay in this pool? I’m not sure, but I certainly am glad I jumped in and found the feel of the water. I just tweeted out a request for a recommendation of a good plug in for WordPress MU (the program that makes this blog run), so I can share mytweets automatically in the sidebar. Stay tuned for the results. If you want swimming lessons, I can probably get you to Red Cross Beginner Tweeter level. I’ll have to find out if there is a patch for that. (The Red Cross used to be big on patches, but I date myself here).
I thought NECC was a twitterfest, too, until one of my PLN friends showed me how to use the Twitter search API to count the number of posts that used the #necc and #necc09 hashtags. Counting the responses even after the conference ended, there were about 200 users of Twitter and about 1500 tagged messages. I posted over a hundred, and I believe you and a few others posted a lot as well, which means that a lot of users posted only one or two.
Of course, there may have been a lot that went untagged; I know I posted at least as many untagged messages as tagged during the conference, because I went from about 800 tweets to 1200 over the course of Sunday to Thursday. Even so, the statistical evidence suggests that the Twitterers weren’t as much of an influence as we thought we were.
Comment by Andrew B. Watt — July 2, 2009 @ 9:50 am
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