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.

Flick launches statistics for your photo sharing accounts. I know of several folks who are using Flickr as their image engine and then pulling their images into their website via the API. I suspect this will make it easier for more projects to use that model now that they can better track use.

Make sure you look for the funny old skool "under construction" animated GIFs when you sign up for these stats.