Conference Tools for Twitter

Recent experience of following (and contributing to) Twitter stream at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association inspired a number of ideas (not all original, I'm sure, and some probably already implemented) in connection with Twitter and conferences:

1. Conference organizers should devise and disseminate a simple hashtag schemes for sessions/presentations.
2. Set up scheduled tweets that announce sessions, say, 15 minutes ahead of time.  Tweet can contain a link to web page with detailed information about session.
3. Presenters can submit brief, say 5 to 10,  tweet summary of the points they are making and these can be automatically scheduled to be tweeted during the talk.
4. If talks are being live streamed, start of each talk can be marked by a tweet with URL to the stream.  Major point tweets could be synced to location in recorded video/audio.
5. Develop an app that aggregates and archives live tweets of presentations for live and followup discussion.

What would you add?

Sociology of Information Nuggets

Elections and a three course semester have crowded out blogging over last few months.  And so, the blogger's cop out of pointers to some recent interesting reads:

Maya Alexandri has a fun post, "What Thomas Cromwell had in common with the Dewey decimal system" calling attention the theme of information revolutions as noted in the Joan Acocella review of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall in The New Yorker.  Alexandri and Acocella note interesting similarity of Cromwell's time and our own as eras in which "information is being radically reorganized."  It's precisely the desire to clarify such recapitulations that drives my own work on the sociology of information.


Semil Shah offers a  panegyric post about Timehop, an app that automatically sends you a photo of what you were doing a year ago today.  It purports, among other things, to be a "solution" to the problem of having boxes of memories that you either never find the time to look at or into which you unintentionally dump hour or hour of time you don't have.  Shah's optimistic take is

The carousel of old slides, the cigar box of warped pictures, and the Instagrams you’ve taken, now in your pocket, delivered to you in just the right way.

There are some great research questions swirling around issues like personal memory, artifacts, the externalization and automation of recall, search as every-ready reconstruction of the past.  Stay tuned.