After the conference
I recently made a comment on Twitter that got me thinking after the fact.
In it I quoted Adam Smith, the man on the £20 note. My reference to a ‘conspiracy against the public’ while seemingly subversive actually underlines my frustration at the apparent lack of action following these very enjoyable meets. While there is a great deal of very useful networking and re-energisation more often than not little else follows through. Okay, so this is not quite a ‘contrivance’ but it does seem a terrible waste.
It was to this end that, while chatting with Hadley Beeman, I expressed my disappointment and encouraged that the final session of the day at #localgovcamp end with commitments from attendees to actions they would undertake by close-of-play the following day. Hadley duly took up the chalice and held all and sundry to account in her session, much to her credit.
To this end I have been chewing over something else of potential use after a conference. An archive of tweets. As a medium and a platform Twitter is uniquely suited to conference coverage. I’ve personally found it fantastic for navigating what’s hot at mass meetings, for over hearing what is going on in parallel sessions and for interacting and contributing with other attendees.
It’s pretty easy to create an archive. I used TwapperKeeper which pretty much does all the donkey work for you. They even have an export function in beta which generates a delimited (CSV in my case) .tar file you can play around with in a spreadsheet.
I’m cutting and carving the RSS archive of #NDI10 tweets at the moment and it’s been a revealing exercise.
For instance:
@helenmilner tweeted the most with 235 tweets, @cyberdoyle was second with 195 and @hadleybeeman third with 176.
Wednesday was the busiest day with 1783 tweets and 1303 on Thursday.
It took just 670 tweets, from 09:30 – 11:30 on Wednesday, for the topic to trend in UK until Corey Haim sadly took his own life, and Twitter trends with it.
Have a tinker with it here: NDI10_tweet_archive
More on this will hopefully follow on the data.gov.uk Google group
==Postscript: http://andypowe11.net/summarizr/?tkhashtag=NDI10 ==
Brilliant!
3 comments
Interesting post. This is an area I’m working on at Sodash (a smart social media tool we’re currently launching), as we work with a couple of universities on their Twitter use. Documenting conferences is probably not what Biz Stone had in mind when he founded Twitter, but it’s one of the unexpected uses that have emerged.
Browsable archives are a good start. Filtering and segmenting them will increase the value. And being able to pick out a handful of key example tweets that summarise the conversations would be valuable.
Measuring activity feels like a useful thing to do, especially for reporting to stakeholders. Measuring raw activity alone is a bit crude – it’s quantity over quality. So we need to factor in the influence of a particular tweets. The “obvious” thing would be to use an influence calculator such as Klout – but that’s a bad idea, possibly worse than doing nothing at all. It measures how active a person is on Twitter, not how central they are in the community we’re looking at. So I think a more sophisticated approach is wanted, where we look at the structure of the micro-network of conference delegates.
@lesteph and I had a play with something like this ourselves for some work we did on Digital Britain – see http://davepress.org.uk/searchhash/searchhash.php
Thanks for the comments guys. I only just noticed
My bad.
I was thinking about how this data could be mashed up with a conference agenda or separate sessions. Perhaps you could map conversations in a session or even assign values to words and create a sentiment index for workshops for example.
Thanks again for your thoughts.
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