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By Heidi Blanton
 Attending a conference or event today
can result in a whirlwind of information and contacts. People attend
these events with different goals and expectations. Some attend
conferences to gain new skills and information they can take back to
their organisations, while others value what they learn from their
close connections and colleagues. For most people it is probably some
combination of keeping up with best practices and growing their
network.
The benefits come from the real time interactions,
spontaneous personal meetings with people they may have only
communicated with online, and the ability to spread ideas immediately
using various networks. For some of us this constant flux of
information compacted into a few continuous days can be overwhelming
to process, fortunately there are some creative ways to help us
manage what we learn.
Before the Conference
The
best way to get the most out of an upcoming event is to do some
homework before you attend. The networking process can start well
before the conference, even as much as six months. If you are closely
involved with a particular event, I even recommend monitoring your
networks for search terms year round.
Searching Tags
Pulling media together from an event is easy with tags.
Many event organisers create common tags for attendees to use while
they are creating conference related content. Twitter users rely on
hashtags (any word or series of words with a # in front of it; these
do not contain spaces and are normally very short in length). Users
of Flickr, Delicious, and Technorati are already used to tagging
content in photos, to organise links, and on their blog posts. All of
these services allow users to search specifically for tags or full
text.
It is tedious to search each service individually
for your upcoming event, but you can easily aggregate these searches
into your preferred feed reader. New services also allow you to share
your feeds publically. Setting up a public feed before an event and
sharing it during an event allows other attendees to benefit from
your searches with minimal effort. Another service called FriendFeed
allows anybody to create public rooms; you can add services like
Twitter, or RSS feeds from searches that are available to create a
public timeline of all of the content at once.
During the Conference
Twitter
Twitter, the popular micro-blogging
service, allows you to send out updates of only 140 characters at a
time. If you have never been motivated to start using Twitter, I
suggest trying it out first at a conference. Many Twitter power users
are aware that some of the best uses of the web service happen in
real time at events. Using Twitter effectively at conferences depends
primarily on picking the right application (or combination of
applications) that suit your needs. A good Twitter application will
give you real time updates and allows you to save searches for the
event. The array of Twitter applications changes rapidly so it does
not hurt to try a few to see what features you like the best.
TweetDeck is a great desktop application. Web applications include
Twitterfall and Seesmic Web. If you prefer to access Twitter on a
mobile device Echofon (formerly Twitterfon) and TweetDeck are popular
iPhone applications, while TwitterBerry is preferred for many
Blackberry users. My personal favourite mobile web application is
Hahlo for its variety of features.
You will get the most out
of conference tweeting by searching and using the conference hashtag.
The hashtags will bring together the tweets from everybody using them
at the conference. You may see some attendees using the hashtags and
Twitter to take notes on the sessions they attend. A word of warning
to anybody interested in keeping notes through Twitter, do not rely
on the Twitter index when searching for the hashtag later, Twitter
only indexes tweets for a few months. If you would like to archive
your tweets there are a few backup services but many people rely on
RSS of their own feeds in their preferred readers. I also recommend
creating a FriendFeed account and setting up Twitter through there
(only from when you start using FriendFeed, it will not pull in old
tweets if you just begin your account). FriendFeed's search index
will go back further than Twitter's and if you set up a room you can
search the room contents as well as your own personal tweets. A
couple of online services are available to backup your tweets,
BackupMyTweets and Twistory offer free services for this. Twitter
only allows you to see your last 3,200 tweets though, so if you have
been tweeting for a long time you may not have access to many of your
old tweets.
Photos
I am not an avid
photographer, but I do enjoy taking photos at conferences. Looking at
conference photos can be an excellent way to see things you may have
missed in the hustle of the event. Tagging your images with the
conference tag on Flickr or adding your photos to a conference group
is the easiest way to interact with images of an event. Combining
mobile photos with Twitter using services like TwitPic is a quick way
to share an image with a large group of followers (especially when
combined with the conference hashtag). I have recently discovered
some great features with Picasa 3 including synchronising photos
online with Picasa Web Albums, and Picasa's very cool face
recognition tool, all make image editing easy.
LiveBlogging
Maybe
140 characters are not long enough for you, but you like the idea of
real time updates at an event. Many conference attendees can be seen
'LiveBlogging' events through an array of different platforms.
Designed specifically for LiveBlogging, ScribbleLive lets you pull in
other feeds as well as your live content; it even allows you to pipe
that back into your own WordPress blog. If you prefer mobile blogging
platforms, both Tumblr and Posterous work as easily on a mobile phone
as they do on a computer. Posterous allows you to send blog posts by
email and has a simple online interface while Tumblr has some
attractive templates for bloggers. If you already keep a blog online,
you can even use that for LiveBlogging. The possibilities are endless
with the number of tools available.
Networking
Managing your social networks can be
difficult if you have a lot. If you are not into the next new online
network then that is ok, but I do recommend setting up at least one
network, and LinkedIn is probably your best bet here. LinkedIn is the
professional-minded social network and it is easy to share contact
information with people you do meet at conferences. I have received
friend requests from others in a variety of other networks though,
including Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. If you are the type of
person that enjoys the next new thing then try keeping the main
networks up to date. It makes it easy for others to connect with you
with the network they feel more comfortable using.
However,
not everybody prefers to be online so you do have to rely on some
analog tricks if you really want to stay in touch with certain
people. My personal favourite is to collect business cards, but when
I get a card from a new person at an event, I immediately turn it
over and write when and where I met that person at the conference.
Later in my hotel room I then either search for their online presence
or add them to my personal contact list. I also slip the cards into
the back of my name badge, over the years I have collected a personal
archive of business cards by conference by just keeping the name
badges.
Offline
As great as many social networking
tools are for managing people and information, we know that having
reliable Internet access is not always possible at many conferences.
My personal favourite note taking application is Evernote. The
application works on Mac, Windows, mobile (the iPhone application is
free), and synchronises online. The trick for successful information
management is using few applications but having your information
available on whatever device you need it in that instant. Note taking
applications like this do a decent job on Windows or Mac, but for my
Linux based netbook computer I rely simply on a text editor or a word
processing application. Of course, the greatest and simplest
note-taking tool of all time is pen and paper.
After
the Conference
The benefit of a conference does not
have to stop after it is over. I recommend tweaking your initial
Twitter searches to monitor an event year round. Keeping a persistent
search can clue you in on a number of related events in your interest
area, or maybe be a good reminder proposal and paper calls. Your
search will remind you of important dates, like early registration
deadlines, advertised through an event feed or through other members.
Use the search feeds you set up before the conference
as a personal journal of your activity, especially if asked to
present on a conference to your work colleagues or if you like to
summarise your experience on your personal blog. Use your Twitter or
your Flickr photos to jog your memory. You can also use other
attendees' tweets to discover other good sessions that you might have
missed.
Keep up with your new contacts in social networks or
send them an email occasionally to say hello. Twitter, Facebook, or
LinkedIn are good ways catch up with those contacts without spending
too much time doing so.
I mentioned a lot of networks and
tools here. Information management is personal, and the most
important take away is that you should use what is most comfortable
to you. There is also plenty of room for creativity. Share your
experiences on your blog or with your colleagues and investigate the
methods that work the best for you.
Resources
Micro-blogging
Twitter (http://twitter.com/)
is a micro-blogging service that allows status messages of up to 140
characters or less.
TweetDeck
(http://tweetdeck.com/beta/)
is a desktop client application for Twitter that is multi-platform,
also available as an iPhone application.
Twitterfall
(http://twitterfall.com/)
is a web based Twitter application that focuses on real time trends
and searches.
Seesmic Web
(http://seesmic.com/app/)
is a Twitter client that is available as a desktop, web, or iPhone
application.
Echofon (http://echofon.com/)
is a Twitter client available as a free iPhone application or
Firefox extension.
TwitterBerry
(http://www.orangatame.com/products/twitterberry/)
is a mobile application for checking Twitter on a BlackBerry device.
Hahlo (http://hahlo.com/)
is a web based Twitter application built specifically for mobile
devices.
BackupMyTweets
(http://backupmytweets.com/)
is a service that allows you to backup your last 3,200 tweets with
varying pricing plans available.
Twistory (http://twistory.net/)
is a Twitter backup service that allows you to save your tweets to
your favourite calendar service.
Social Networks
Photography
Social Bookmarking
Blogging
Aggregators
Note taking
Evernote
(http://www.evernote.com/)
is a note taking application that is available on Windows, Mac,
iPhone, and the web.
Cool Tech
Eye-fi Wireless SD Card
(http://www.eye.fi/)
is a memory card that automatically uploads photos and videos to
your computer or preferred online service.
Pulse LiveScribe Pen
(http://www.livescribe.com/)
is a digital pen that records what you write on special paper for
upload and indexing to your computer later.
By Heidi Blanton
Heidi is a recent graduate of
information studies from the School of Library and Information
science at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She has
worked in the field of information science continuously for 11 years
and is interested in making it easier for people to find information
in digital environments. Her experience includes archives, libraries,
and information architecture, but she finds the challenges of
organising information in digital environments fulfilling. Heidi also
has a personal fascination with how information moves through social
networks. She is also a classically trained musician and enjoys
attending concerts and recitals in her spare time.
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