Highlights from the Backchannels of NTC 2007
April 5th, 2007 by Michael Gilbert
Early this morning before the hotel’s Internet connection went down, I collected a few tidbits from some of the feed tags as ’07NTC’ or those directly sponsored by NTEN. Here are just a few highlights.
Some of the backchannels set up for the conference haven’t had much update.
For example, the NTC Twitter feed, which I mentioned with a little concern in my piece on the topic of Twitter uses, consisted of two messages from Holly Ross: “Just set up the 07NTC Twitter account!” And “Just landed in DC. Listening to the special “Revv it Up” mix on my iPod to get the energy up and get ready for this crazy conference!” They plan to use it for Questions of the Day though. Today’s is “Who do you want to meet?”
The chat rooms, which unfortunately are set up through a funky web based interface called Gabbly, consisted pretty much entirely of messages like this: “hello?” “anyone here?” and “what? no one’s backchanneling??”.
Daniel Martin, Jon Stahl, and a few other folks have been uploading pictures to Flickr. As of this morning, there were 42 pictures already. Even if you don’t know the people, you might get a kick out of some of the titles. But I’ve always found that conference photo feeds are a good way to help connect (or reconnect) faces to names. Most of the photgraphers are good about identifying the people in each shot.
Del.icio.us is pretty active as well, with a slightly larger range of people bookmarking. From what I can tell, many of the links are to organizations that people here at the conference may be encountering for the first time.
NTEN’s own blog is the richest online resource right now. In “Put This In Your Pipe and Smoke It”, Sonny Cloward talks about how he’s been positioning NTEN as a channel for a wide variety of other sources of valuable information. (At lunch today, we talked about how many other organizations are in the same position, yet persist in only directing their stakeholder to their own organizational content.) I also encourage you to take a look at the growing list of interviews and profiles. There might be people there you want to meet.
NTC Links…
There has been a little bit of blogging and the like at NTC – although it was certainly hindered yesterday, when the internet was down for most of the day. And I think most of the bloggers are too busy…
I was hoping to do a lot more livee blogging but my room wifi did not work and ended up being a barrier.
I have written a lot about back channel design and have found that having channel advocates and a live audio stream help with remote participation.
nice to see u in dc