Conference 2.0

Given my prior research about conference tagging, and the paper I’m giving at AoIR 7.0, I thought I’d comment on the technology use at the Hyperlinked Society conference yesterday. While IRC is certainly not “2.0,” back channels seem to happen at the more geekie conferences, along with tagging. At the Hyperlinked Society conference I was somewhat surprised that a back channel wasn’t set up ahead of time, but I was also pleased how little it mattered. Dave Weinberger just said, “let’s go here” and that was that. It obviously wouldn’t work in a larger conference with simultaneous sessions, but for this it was fine.

After that, a tag was agreed upon in the back channel “hyperlinkedsociety.” This, I think, probably suffered from a lack of pre-coordination more than the back channel because even people who use tagging sites may have missed it there. An announcement would have been fine for that too I suppose, it just didn’t happen.

It seems there is more value at a conference like this one for tagging photos rather than web pages mainly because everyone heard the same presentations and wrote down the links they want to visit. Other types of links probably need more context in a blog post so Technorati tags would be good for giving a bit more exposure to all bloggers who post about the conference, not just people visiting the blogs they already know.