The Social Space Station

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Twittering happenings at the ICCMSN

Tomorrow is opening day of the International Conference on Computer Mediated Social Networking (ICCMSN - 2008) right here in Dunedin, New Zealand. The conference takes a look at many different aspects of technology enabled social networking such as the social, technological, identity-based, educational, virtual - the list goes on!

I’ll be there, sitting in the audience or helping out around the place, chairing a session, maybe even a panel and certainly out here in online social space. I’m looking forward to it as the event should be very interesting and a welcome distraction from the heap of marking awaiting my attention.

If you are curious about the ICCMSN but won’t be there, feel free to follow events online at Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook. The intention is to encourage interactions, questions, comments, and conversations by and between delegates over the three days (and maybe beyond). The aggregation of these (tweets in particular) should provide a useful view into the happenings at this event.

The plan is to project the ICCMSN lifestream at the presentations and in other places people congregate. Naturally, the Twitter webpage itself is far from optimal in terms of visualising a steady flow of all the interactions (e.g., replies) for a particular user (see plurk for a newer, horizontal-based approach to timelining conversations between users).

Twhirl?

Instead, Twirl will present the steady stream of tweets as they flow, in almost real-time (thanks to mobile tweeting and WiFi options). It is an excellent desktop app that runs on the Adobe AIR platform and an example of a task specific tool that’s leapt out of the confines of the web browser.

Delegates can contribute their thoughts, questions, etc. by replying to ICCMSN2008 using the convention ‘@iccmsn2008’. This filters out users’ everyday tweets (as interesting as these might be) so just conference related tweets appear (well this depends on what they say of course).

Another recent user driven invention on Twitter are Twemes. Twemes are a convention for specifying keywords or tags in a particular tweet using the ‘#’ character. For example, #iccmsn2008 will identify the content of a tweet as being about the ICCMSN conference. Specifying ‘iccmsn’ as the search term on twemes.com will display all recent tweets that used this hashtag.

All of this could be irrelevant if the users don’t buy into the concept (as always). Having said that, this is a conference about social networking so perpaps they’ve bought into it already?

We shall see tomorrow.

Here are some essential Twitter links:


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