Beyond the Button

The backchannel at this year's Museums and the Web (#mw2008) was especially active and important to my experience at the event. Check out some of the ephemeral cast out as a result of the discussion.

Twitter, Flickr, and the Blog feed

More and more folks got addicted to the backchannel feed this year. Thanks to Mike Ellis' OneTag system everyone's tweets got aggregated into one thread via the #mw2008 tag for all to follow at conference.archimuse.com....and elsewhere

• HashTags' look at #mw2008
• Tweet Scan on #mw2008
• Flickr on #mw2008
• Technorati's aggregate of blog posts tagged #mw2008

One of the most exciting aspects of the #mw2008 tag for me was social in nature. By following the people posting on #mw2008 I was able to make TONS of new twitter and flickr friends who are specifically posting on issues and ideas that I care about already (museum folk). In this way the backchannel serves as a new high bandwidth networking tool.

As these tools become a more important method for fully experiencing a conference both live and remotely we will need new ways to visualize the large amount of data and content that is created. Stamen design's visualization of the backchannel at the 2006 ETech conference looks like an interesting first start.

Did any of you fellow mw2008 attendees have any cool backchannel experiences?

One last twitter link...check out your own tweet cloud. Here's mine.

I love del.icio.us! I use it a lot and think it could be way useful for just about anyone who uses the web. But if you have ever tried to convince a group of non-tech-nerds that it might help them out with their missions then you know the uphill battle I've faced. You not only have to cajole them into signing up for a del.icio.us account but you need to explain the concept of "social" bookmarking, teach them to tag, and then convince them that this will actually be more useful than just keeping their bookmarks on their local computer.

In steps The Common Craft Show. These folks are building a set of fun and quirky videos that do a marvelous job at explaining tech tools to the general population. This great example shows why teachers might want to use del.icio.us. I couldn't have said it better myself. No really I couldn't have.

I often hear from people that Twitter (and my use thereof) is simply pure vanity in a new 140 character format. But internet and technology blogger, Andy Carvin has some interesting thoughts about how the tool could be used in natural disasters. We recently blogged over on Science Buzz, how cell phone and internet technology is helping to report the crackdowns in Myanmar.

I've also thought for a while that Twitter could be a fun way to give the public a picture of what an huge institution like the Science Museum is all about on a daily basis. We could create a group twitter account that any staff member could log into. Then they could post what they were doing at that moment with their work day: "Talking with a visitor about chemistry", "Planning a trip to Montana for a dinosaur excavation", "searching for information on hydrophobic coatings for medical devices", "talking to the state legislature about science education". Over time it could paint an interesting picture of the work our diverse organization is undertaking.