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 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.