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Curbing Your Comments At Conferences

Posted by Ilana Arazie on November 23rd, 2009 5:32 PM

-danah boyd headshot-

A Twitter backchannel caused quite the stir at the Web 2.0 Expo this week in New York. As Danah Boyd, social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, spoke about “Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media,” the crowd tweeted their critiques of her talk. Many complained that she spoke too quickly and read her speech, as opposed to connecting with the crowd. Others quipped about dating Boyd. The audience chuckled as these tweets appeared. Only Boyd wasn’t in on the joke. She had her back to the screen and couldn’t receive the feedback needed to tweak her presentation.

Ironically, she talked about curating content and said, “We need technological innovations…tools that allow people to slice and dice content so as to not reach information overload. This is not simply about aggregating or curating content to create personalized destination sites. Frankly, I don’t think this will work.” I wonder if she might feel that curating the content behind her would have worked.

The next day, the staff apologized for their handling of the Twitter disruption and said they would experiment with curating feeds going forward. Although, I felt badly for Boyd, I have to admit that a big part of me was disappointed. I wanted the real deal, not the CNN-like version of Twitter commenting. Then again, that was selfish. No speaker should be mocked during a presentation. Unless it’s done in light fun?

I ran into master Twitterer Chris Brogan the next day and asked him what he thought about the situation. He didn’t believe in curation of any kind. He thought that Boyd’s fast-paced speech was the main issue, not the live feed.

A Facebook friend Pinny Gniwisch added, “What happened to Boyd was sad and to a point mean, however Orielly is known to have the best speakers. If someone reaches that keynote level, they have to know they need to bring their A game and nothing less will do.”

Other speakers like Baratunde Thurston, who rocked his keynote about Hashtags, disagreed. “You can’t have a divided experience where the speaker is in one world and the audience is in another. But the larger point is that people have come to think there is an intrinsic right to heckling. What happened to actually listening to the speaker at a conference? In this new age where everyone demands to be heard, I fear that we are losing respect for the art of listening.” Easy for him to say. Baratunde is a hysterically smart comedian and commentator; it’s impossible not listen to him.

As a multi-tasking nation, the thought of sitting still and watching one person speak at a podium without checking an iPhone or tweeting a thought can be maddening. Anton Mannering, who recently produced the Audience Conference, ignores this point and refuses to add a Twitter backchannel to his events. He even goes as far as banning Internet usage during some of his events.

“Are attendees paying proper attention to the speaker, or are they busy monitoring the backchannel? Having laptops open for this is rude, and using them to target speakers is abusive. If event organizers allow this to happen, speakers will stop coming. Or speakers will change their message to a populist one, which is no good to anyone,” he says.

Many techsters remember the Sarah Lacy interview fiasco with Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW in 2008. The audience panned the BusinessWeek reporter’s interview style, claiming she didn’t control the interview or ask the right questions. Granted the interview was known as one of the worst conference moments, but I wonder if it was necessary to add fuel to the fire with a live, displayed feed.

Is it time to start curating stream comments at conferences? Or would you pull the censorship card? Event organizers might decide to challenge the crowd’s ADD and get them focusing by disabling Web
access all together.

Or maybe speakers should have teleprompters facing them with comments so that they can get in on the discussion. Of course, that might throw off their concentration, impair their talk and evoke more online cruelty. It’s not easy being public in a social media world!

 

Viewing 49 Comments

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    While it strikes me that the backchannel is a pretty miserable addition for the speaker, what I think is missed is that it also makes for a pretty miserable situation for the audience.

    As someone who attended Danah Boyd's talk at the Web 2.0 Expo, one of the things that I noticed as soon as I fell into tracking the twitterwall instead of Boyd wasn't just the disconnect from the content she was delivering but a disconnection from my fellow audience members. All at once we became a bunch of commentators versus non-commentators versus quippers versus the outraged versus the baffled versus the annoyed versus the distracted versus the delighted circling snarkers, etc.

    When Aristotle recorded his thoughts on Rhetoric (meaning specifically spoken rhetoric) 2300+ years ago he knew what we would lose now if we let everyone speak at once and that is a sense of audience, this is a single group hearing and seeing another person deliver opinion/insight/wisdom for later consideration and discourse.

    The whole reason any of us feel the same need as Aristotle's Greek brothers and sisters to gather physically in a specified place and time even though we live in an era of constant digital information exchange is that we need to see and hear *together* the ideas of another.

    As audience members, when others around us listen, laugh, nod, take notes, shake their heads, or clap we pick up a wealth of signals about the larger validity, context, and acceptance of the content and delivery. The crowd may be wrong, but we will at least know how it responds when everyone is in a more or less level playing field (there are no cross browser, connectivity, or other factors to mediate our interaction with a live presenter).

    My final slippery thought: A twitterwall/backchannel may promise a new kind of unity for audience members, but it instead unites us on the basis of the separation (unique twitter ids, etc) that we came to the conference to set aside for a few hours. Instead of conferring we merely assemble. Instead of listening we wait to speak. Instead of watching the speaker we watch for our comment.
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    That Sounds interesting, I agree with you.Please keep at your good work, I would come back often.*
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    I speak, and I don't mind people tweeting during my talks. That said, I also encourage audience participation when appropriate, which helps at smaller conferences when your presentation needs to be adjusted on the fly to answer an audience's real time questions as they fit within the overall discussion. I've been practicing speaking while monitoring backchannel at the same time, and it isn't easy, by any means, to speak, be helpful and informative, read your audience's body language and casually glance at feedback. Regardless, I just have a feeling it may become a requirement to be able to do so at larger conferences.
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    It would be great if someone in the audience was responsible for saving certain Tweets as favorites, like Scoble often does, and the moderator was only responsible for paying attention to those Tweets/Questions/Comments.

    As a speaker, you have a million things moving through your mind. Monitoring the back channel for the needle in the haystack shouldn't be one of them.

    I don't think you can take the Twitter display away from the Southby crowd, we will just create something else. The audience wants to be connected and have a voice. The question that remains is whether or not all those voices are good for the speaker during their presentation.
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    was at w2e very interesting debate, none-the-less the comments were rude, people have to stop living behind the keyboard and as real people, people's feelings have to matter and trashing someone who most probably spent a non-trivial amount of time preparing the presentation (btw the slides were awesome i would love that pic collection for my wallpapers) and the whole thing was destroyed, not so much because of the presenter but the audience being immature and impatient. The taunting began almost immediately not allowing her any time to get in a comfort zone! I believe there should be social interaction, but along those same lines I believe people need to grow up and respect other people.!
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    It was kinda of a Wizard of Oz type moment ("Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!!") when the O'Reilly folks pulled the feed. Probably made more of it than just leaving it up there.

    I like the idea of a live feedback loop for presenters, they should know what's going on behind their backs, so perhaps this could have been addressed via some kind of monitor. Better that, then filtering every single comment that comes in.
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    no curation - antithesis of SM BUT attendees should not be "mean"...all in all, she just had a bad day...we should give her a break...BUT the bar is higher if you're a keynote...NO READING ALOUD ;)
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    At every conference there are good, great and disappointing keynotes and sessions. Yes, it would be nice if they all lived up to expectations and costs but the reality is that they don't. As a collection of social media and technology professionals many in the crowd seems to thing that the issues here are about letting it all hang out publicly and not censoring tweets, and the ones who let the spitballs fly felt justified.

    What I have to say to people who feel that they were justified in heckling her behind her back is, "What are you, two years old?"

    That was a person standing up there whose nervousness was reflected in her delivery. You were disappointed. Do adult things to convey that at the appropriate time and way.

    As for O'Reilly's move, whether it was the right "social media" thing to do or not is far overshadowed by the fact that it was the compassionate and human thing to do.
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    wow. great comment!
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    Great points, ISR. Sadly, we probably need to display Social Media Etiquette posters in from of the ballrooms as you enter future keynotes that stream twitter feeds.
    Baratunde, right on about the comment on the art of listening. It is a lost art, isn't it?
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    Agreed.
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    Excellent point, and it's a matter of behavior driving outcome. The question about whether or not O'Reilly was right to pull the feed needs to include the fact that had the criticisms been balanced and courteous, they wouldn't have felt the need to pull it.
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    Personally my issue with this is that it starts with a retread of things we've heard before--gets more interesting about 6 minutes in and there are actually some very interesting concepts introduced but it's hard to get the audience back at this point.So I am less engaged on levels of presentation but also content.And yes a bit of rhythm could help here.

    That said, another speaker at w2E, Heather Gold, actually has done quite a bit of thinking about this issue. I am interested in some of the concepts in her google talk on "How to Tummel" http://bit.ly/xISwJ. (I haven't seen the web2.0Expo talk up yet). Intuitive but we don't always apply these ideas. She talks at length about how to present in engaging ways, using the give and take of attention... but also talks about the split-attention of the audience tweeting. She immediately asks the audience to close the laptop and says she will try to earn it and if they open the laptop she'll know she didn't. Later there's a conversation about tweeting. Also asks the audience to "not make fun of anyone" as an inversion of comedy--very interesting ideas.

    Tricky issues with the backchannel because extending the community requires it. And one could argue the backchannel always was there, it just wasn't transparent. You can't stop it. And it seems like "old tech" for us to gather in lecture halls for one to many communication when we're all working on interconnected conversational models. How to balance? Very interesting discussion.

    On another front--I read somewhere that the setup was not particularly good for integrating audience/sense of dead air in the room...was that true? I watched online so did not have any sense of how things felt inside the room itself.
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    What the audience did to Ms. Boyd was rude & cowardly. How many of the people "tweeting-behind-her-back" would have the nerve to deliver a keynote at all, particularly if they knew that people like themselves would be live-hating on Twitter?

    Anyone who has done even a minimal amount of public-speaking will tell you that if your speech is going to be any good, you need to focus your attention on your presentation & the audience - it is unfair to expect a speaker to simultaneously monitor a back-channel dialogue.

    I'm all for people being able to tweet during speeches, but the backchannel should not be publicly displayed. Gives too much room for unnecessary & often ignorant commentary from people who wouldn't have the cojones to stand up and shout what they just tweeted. But if you put their words up on a screen behind the speaker, they might as well have done just that.

    D.N.A
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    The difference between *having* a backchannel and *displaying it on a stage* are staggering. It's appropriate for the audience to have a voice, but couldn't they just, you know, wait a few minutes? I realize that listening to a tech speaker is not at all like watching a movie, still... public display of the backchannel just makes me think of Mystery Science Theater. Which is for fun, not serious critique or even "higher engagement" with the content.

    There is, however, a model for movies that DOES let the audience "have a voice" in realtime -- it is Roger Ebert's Cinema Interruptus, where he is in the theater with a remote control DVD, and at any time the audience can yell out STOP! and he stops to let them make their point (which he may or may not comment on, and which often includes a brief discussion among other participants). While this is both wildly entertaining and often very informative... it takes FOUR NIGHTS to complete one film! By the last night, even Ebert has begun telling people to STFU.

    But even with Cinema Interruptus, the FIRST night is devoted to showing the film start to finish with no interruptions. In other words, the live audience participation does not begin until the following night, *after* everyone has first experienced it exactly as the developer/filmmaker intended. The idea is, you do not have to *like* this film, but you do have to pay attention to it BEFORE voicing your opinions.

    Granted, one argument in favor of the displayed backchannel is that it can help improve the presentation in realtime. I have to ask if anyone who actually believes that has ever given a keynote presentation. We bring people to speak at tech (emphasis on TECH) conferences because they have some insight or experience they're brave enough to share, not because they are professional performers skilled in making sweeping ad-hoc adjustments. If the only people allowed to give presentations at tech events are those with the performance experience and talent to actually shift their keynote in realtime based on processing audience feedback, the pool of possible presenters drops to, oh, a half-dozen.

    Personally, I'll never speak at an event with a *displayed* backchannel unless it's an extremely small audience and the display/discussion is part of the talk itself. Having a backchannel is great. Displaying it... or even expecting the speaker to be following it, well, I'll never be that good. It takes every neuron I have just to keep the stage fright from overwhelming my ability to form reasonably functional sentences. On a really good day, I can (if the physics of the stage lighting permits) adjust to feedback from the audience the "old skool" way -- if I can see they're not paying attention (by watching body language), I can try to adjust tempo or make a small shift.

    I'm all for backchannel discussions, but have seen not a shred of scientific evidence that it's possible to fully engage with the content while *also* typing, reading, processing continuous backchannel commentary. The best use of a public, live backchannel would be *after* the presentation is complete, in follow-up viewings/discussions.

    I'd much rather see something like "Keynote Interruptus" at a conference, where everyone first watches the keynote, and THEN can go into a second viewing experience of the video of it, where at any time someone can yell STOP and discuss it, and the backchannel can fully participate.
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    This is a great example of how technology does not always improve the user experience.

    As a speaker, the problem I've seen with a lot of tech conferences is that many of the people presenting have no formal training in how to engage an audience. Many of them *sit down*, faces lit up by a laptop, and basically read their slides. Their slides, of course, have as many sentences as they can cram on them, or an unreadable graph/chart packed with too much information. This sucks all the energy out of the room faster than you can say "hashtag."

    The solution isn't a backchannel. Rather, the solution is making sure the speakers have training in this area. Either the speaker has professional training, or the conference organizer appoints someone to give the speaker a quick lesson (don't sit down; use the remote; don't look at your laptop; move around the room while speaking; slides should be bullet points or simple images, not whole paragraphs.)

    It is the organizer's responsibility to properly vet the speakers. That means not only looking at technical prowess, but also speaking ability, past speeches, and training. And yes, as a conference organizer who has had to vet speakers before, I know this can be a challenge...but when done right, the conference is 100x better.

    Screw the backchannel.

    -Erica
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    #GreatMomentsInLife @KathySierra thanking me on Twitter :)

    These are just some really awesome points, Kathy. Ilana, Khayyam and I talked at length about this situation in the green room at Javits after my own keynote, and I focused on the same point you raised: backchannel = ok; displaying it only for audience = bad; displaying it for both audience and speaker = slightly better but still problematic..

    Jeremiah Owyang has written about integrating twitter backchannels into panels, a decidedly different environment from keynotes, but still relevant and worth a read. http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/04/24/l...

    In terms of positive experiences with speakers integrating feedback from a simultaneous backchannel, I've had one such experience. Again, it wasn't a keynote speech, so the context is important. I was interviewing White House advisor Valerie Jarrett at Netroots Nation. Most of the questions had been submitted in advance via blogs, facebook and twitter. However, we also accepted live questions from people in the room or watching remotely online

    The conference organizers had a team of people reading through the hashtag I'd set up, and they would display ONE question on the stage-facing monitor that I could see. After I asked that question (or ignored it for a sufficiently long amount of time) they would rotate in another question. That single purpose monitor could also be used to send me notes that might help the interview. They didn't use it for that purpose, but I can imagine lots of scenarios: e.g. "Dude, your fly is unzipped"

    My larger point on all this comes from my experience as a standup comic. We have to deal with hecklers all the time, and a common response to hecklers is, "I'm up here with a microphone, and no one paid to come hear what you have to say."

    By displaying a live backchannel visible ONLY to the audience the web 2.0 organizers helped turn a significant number of audience members into hecklers AND gave them microphones.

    LOVE the idea of Keynote Interruptus and am happy to be a guinea pig for testing purposes. I'd love to give a talk then have it rewound and discussed with me in the room to answer questions or flesh out points. Most folks probably wouldn't be so comfortable looking at themselves on screen though :)
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    @baratunde I just tweeted you and I are up for Keynote Interruptus, and at least one conference organizer (Webstock) wants to give it a try as well. Who's with us? ; )
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    It's a movement!
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    Hey Baratunde and everyone,

    Thanks for continuing the conversation. Keynote Interruptus sounds like a great idea. Esp. if someone can highlight the best tweets of the night! Of course, those will be the kinder comments.

    We'll have to follow up this blog with some of your new ideas for handling comments at conferences.


    Ilana
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    I should clarify the comment I said to Ilana. I didn't hear the speech, but what I saw was that most people were saying "slow down" in the stream. It's hard getting a lot of points into a small space. I've seen Danah speak before and love what she has to say.

    But the backchannel as a backdrop isn't all that pleasant, even when things are going positively.
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    Was hoping to hear you clarify that point. I have seen backchannel wind up badly many times. I am not a fan at all. The "problem" is that people revert to children and post negative, hurtful, and completely nonconstructive fodder. Even constructive criticism can end up sucking up all the attention of the audience.

    Anonymity exacerbates the problem but even when the comments are attached to Twitter profiles, it is clear people revert to unproductive attacks. It is also not clear that when an audience has constructive points that it helps the speaker.
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    Chris, I was really talking about the people who clearly approved the heckling. I know you as one of the most genuinely caring and thoughtful people . . . . anywhere.
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    Yes, Chris. I would never want to portray you as insensitive!

    Ilana
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    Excellent thoughtful comments by KathySierra and Baratunde. Completely agree with Baratunde's statement : "By displaying a live backchannel visible ONLY to the audience the web 2.0 organizers helped turn a significant number of audience members into hecklers AND gave them microphones."

    Rude is rude. Don't give people a vehicle to amplify that in the future. I have seen too many instances where people pile on, and actually start making comments to turn the attention onto themselves, rather than to improve the experience for all.
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    I don't understand why the merits of respect have to be debated. If someone is talking, shut up and listen. Anything less and you're acting like a child.
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    Exactly it's extremely rude to cut people off.
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    Reading this conversation, I realized that it might help if I wrote down and shared my perspective on what unfolded: http://bit.ly/5Cdbwd It's a long ranty blog post but perhaps it can shed light on what I saw and felt and experienced from the stage.
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    Thank you for your very honest description of how you felt during your talk. Public speaking is the number one fear for people and a Twitter backchannel doesn't help things! You def. described an honest depiction of what can go wrong and we can all relate to those thoughts. But I think we learned a lot from this experience and I hope future conferences will tweak feed and stage presentations. At the same time, I hope posters will be more sensitive. I look forward to hearing you talk at upcoming conferences. It will be worth it!
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    On the old days people used paper and ink for backchannel conversations but that technology kept the trolls at bay... Backchannel conversations throttled by technology are both a chance of obtaning quirk interesting insight from your fellow and an invitation to smirk, harsh comments that do not construct what is being discussed or presented on the main channel.

    Having said that: I agree with Darcy, it all this lies on respect: Respect for your decision of paying to listen to someone you "thought" might provide new information to something, respect for your fellow audience members who in turn paid for the same chance and finally respect for the human on stage who regardless of the benefits she might perceive by keynoting (e.g $, whuffie, etc) has decided to share her knowledge.

    off note question: why didn't someone raised her hand and told her what was happening behind her "back" or at least complain about her speed? when did the crowd became a mob?
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    Having keynoted (knee-shakingly, frankly) at an O'Reilly Conference, I have to agree with Kathy and Baratunde on all fronts, and if I'm ever asked to keynote again, I would be happy to engage in vigorous Keynote Interruptus too...

    If you're as accomplished a performer and communicator as Baratunde, and as adept at dealing with audience interaction, participation and heckling as he is, then I'm sure it's easier to be multi-channel. Apparently Jonathan Ames was pretty unbelievable as a moderator at the PEN World Voices Festival earlier this year. By and large, however, I'm yet to see at most (even tech or social media) events I go to either a comprehensive strategy, or an adequate format for involving even in-the-room commenters effectively, let alone IRC backchannel snark, Twitter dissection or latterly social TV discussion on conference webstreams. I'd love to see a list of great formats that encourage a more dynamic relationship between presenter or moderator/panel and audience/attendees - is there such a list?

    Maybe you need to be someone like Andrew Schneider (http://en.oreilly.com/et2009/public/schedule/de...) or Marcel.li Antunez (http://www.marceliantunez.com/tikiwiki/tiki-ind...) to deal with it effectively...

    For those interested in the actual substance of what danah boyd had to say, here it is:
    http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/Web2Expo.html
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    As a frequent speaker and workshop facilitator, I know the two-edged sword of the backchannel from firsthand experience. I agree with previous commenters who said that the backchannel is a legitimate form of expression, but that at the same time it should absolutely not be displayed while a presenter is talking, unless the speaker requests it.

    Most speakers need to get into "the zone" to give a great talk -- a kind of flow experience. Reading live tweets while speaking may be possible for some, but most speakers have enough of a challenge trying to keep up with the ever-increasing expectations of audiences.

    Every speaker has a unique style, and some may prefer to have an open, and visible, backchannel. But I am sure in such cases they will want to access that channel as a way to interact with their audience, as opposed to "behind-the-back snark." I have seen a live-tweet wall work pretty well in panel discussions, for example, precisely because the members of the panel who are not speaking can monitor the stream.

    My own practice (unless I am on a panel) is to wait until after I am done speaking and then go check the tweetstream for insights that can help me become a better speaker. I highly recommend this practice.

    Some might say we need a "Miss Manners" for social media, to help us understand the rules and etiquette for the online world. I disagree. This stuff is too new. Social norms can't be dictated; they need to sort themselves out over time. Once we figure out what Twitter really is (we haven't yet) and have had some time to let it sink in, then we can decide what's polite and what isn't. I would much rather we sift through these things gradually and come to consensus through conversation
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    I think that multi channel is a preference like single task VS multitasking.
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    What a fantastic conversation. I have spent part of today in a smaller version of this same topic on my blog, receiving some harsh flaming at first for taking a critical stance on backchannels.

    Thank you for pushing this debate. It is so necessary for this dynamic of live presenters to continue to thrive, be its best, and be relevant.
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    really steve.... very fantastic conversation.
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    One of the things I have yet to see pointed out here is the fact that you came to see the speaker speak. Whether it is a paid presenter or a free one the goal is for one person to present and for many to listen. This is not a roundtable, but tweeting during someone presenting is turning it into a roundtable discussion. Basically you are talking when someone is talking. Your parents, and your parents parents have a phrase for this. It is called being rude. I don't buy into the notion that "oh we have Twitter now so this is going to happen". No. Stop it. If you would not say out loud what you want to twitter then save it for a time specifically set aside for it. I love technology and Twitter as much as the next guy. But I don't love it enough to use it to be rude, and to use it to talk when s/he is talking.

    I do speak on a regular basis and I think a MUCH better way to handle this is to set aside a distinct portion of the presenting time (if possible) for dealing with audience discussion and feedback this way. If you are given 45 minutes and you know people will be tweeting about the topic speak for 35 minutes and then pull up the twitter stream and deal with the Q&A/Comments then.

    @patrickallmond
    (And yes I have tweeted during a speech. However I'd be surprised if I ever do it again. Because I don't want it done to me.)
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    Sounds like something the folks at http://www.paratweet.com/ are working on.
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    "Curating?" What an interesting word choice. It may be over-tempting to focus on that, but choosing "curating" over the obvious "editing" is telling. Do we really believe that the tweet stream from a talk's audience is more valuable than the talk itself? Because the conference organizers don't "curate" the program, they invite submissions, choose some, reject others—they act as editors. Or is that "censors?"

    I must be turning curmudgeonly. The line between vox populi and cacophony is becoming hard to find in the social media world.
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    really cool conversation.
    keep it going plzz
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    I was horrified to read about the backchannel and particularly this ambush of a speaker. The hours taken to prepare a useful and interesting presentation deserve better than this. I suggest that some of the people doing the tweeting during her presentation take the time to read Ms Boyd's thoughts on what happened. http://bit.ly/5Cdbwd

    I don't go to a concert to hear the off-key version of Handel's Messiah from my seat mate and I don't go to presentations to hear comments on the speaker's looks. Why are we at the presentation if not to learn something? If we don't agree, we can ask a question or comment at the appropriate time.

    The fact that the backchannel was projected behind the speaker and she had no way to know what was going on was outrageous. If the intention of the backchannel was to improve her presentation, then it would have made sense to have her see it too. Really! Put yourself in her shoes. Her experiences sounds like something that happens in grade school when everyone is whispering behind your back and you don't know why.

    I was recently at Pubcon in Las Vegas. As a teacher of business presentation skills, I noticed that many of the presentations fell far short of ideal - too fast, too general, too much silliness - but still, I learned a lot, even from some of those same presentations.

    Are we so smart that we have nothing to learn, even sometimes from someone who's speaking isn't quite perfect on that particular day? Are we so childish that we feel it's okay to publicly humiliate someone? Sounds like something Chairman Mao would have enjoyed during China's cultural revolution.
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    Who said this to you? "the Web 2.0 staff claimed they were experiencing technical difficulties" That's not true. We took it down because the comments were inappropriate. We never claimed it was due to technical problems. Please correct this.

    - Kaitlin Pike
    Community Manager
    Web 2.0 Expo
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    Look forward to seeing DISQUS evolve – as I’ve said before, I do think it’s a great system, just needs some fine-tuning (but I’m picky at the best of times!).
    Colon Cleanse
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    Hi All,

    Can i know more aboutDISQUS?

    Thanks,
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    I was there and was shocked at what happened during Danah Boyd's talk. I really would never speak with a Twitter Stream behind me. I agree with one commenter that it divided the audience's attention. It's just too much and not really effective. Most people are not really saying anything that the people in the audience don't already know. http://ow.ly/DfFd
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    A Twitter stream on a conference according to my opinion is not effective at all.
    It's one of these fancy things one might say that these days is a must at events like that , but I think it just distracts the audience and can be heavily misused. We should get back to the old-school conferences known from before the web 2.0 era.
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    Every speaker has a unique style, and some may prefer to have an open, and visible, backchannel. But I am sure in such cases they will want to access that channel as a way to interact with their audience, as opposed to "behind-the-back snark." I have seen a live-tweet wall work pretty well in panel discussions, for example, precisely because the members of the panel who are not speaking can monitor the stream.
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    but every speaker should have the ability to get the attention of the listener .
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    Great article. There's a lot of good information here, though I did want to let you know something - I am running Mac OS X with the circulating beta of Firefox, and the look and feel of your blog is kind of bizarre for me.Sohbet
    I can understand the articles, but the navigation doesn't work so good.health
    • ^
    • v
    That's very informative speech and seems to be very useful. the most important question for me is the future of this sphere in a long period but the author actually doesn't think about the far future.

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