Things I learned at Convergence 09

I hadn't intended to attend Convergence 09. I found out about it the day before Convergence 09 took place when I read an email from a colleague about the event, described on Cossette West's site as, "A Forum for Digital Marketing Thought Leadership". When it comes to professional development, my pursuits have mainly leaned towards digital art and emerging technologies (admittedly not a great fit considering my work profile, but it suits my personal interests which is the best I've got to go on these days). Amidst the workshops and conferences I've attended in the past, marketing is rarely at the forefront of topics of discussion. However, what grabbed my attention when I first came across the Cossette West site was the next bit of text I encountered on the main page: "Featuring Keynote Speaker, David Plouffe, Obama's Unsung Hero Campaign Manager, Obama for America". Well, why didnt' you say so?!

David Plouffe's keynote address was an inspiration. I have just about zero experience with political science so I'm going to refrain from commenting on why he's so great. As a believer in Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the semantic web, I will say this though, Plouffe's presentation reaffirmed my belief that the web holds the potential to place the power of mass media in the hands of the people. Finally!

However...

My first experience with live blogging:
Convergence 09 keynote address by David Plouffe, Campaign Manager, Obama for America

1. Identify a noteworthy point in the presentation
2. Quickly decide on how to best sum up the point, injecting personal commentary and wit if possible in 140 characters or less. Leave room to add related hashtag(s), reference speaker (use Twitter address if available), and links (shorten any relevant web addresses using a URL shortener - I use bit.ly)
3. Review what you've written to ensure it makes sense and edit where necessary
   
4. While focusing on completing steps 2 & 3, keep an ear out for the next appropriately blog-able item
5. Check your post to make sure it's accurate, appropriate, unoffensive and grammatically correct (though I've observed that this step is widely accepted to be optional)
   
6. Half way through completing step 5 realize speaker is in the midst of making his next profound point, way more interesting than the one you're currently working on
7. Quickly decide on how to sum up next point in 140 characters or less (forgo the personal commentary and wit this time around)
8. Make the somewhat foolhardy decision to bookmark the site the speaker mentioned - because you're a nerd you've already logged into Delicious anyway
9. Press the update button to post your last half-reviewed tweet
   
10. Realize the speaker has moved onto making another profound point
    
11. Press the update button to post your last tweet without reviewing it first, realize you've forgotten to add the hashtag(s) and/or refer to the speaker and/or include a shortened link to the site he mentioned
    
12. Peer into your clutter of your mind to try and do your best to accurately recall the last point the speaker made
13. Experience difficulty editing the point down to 140 characters. With some struggle, manage to whittle your post down to a cryptic, choppy faux-sentence that still leaves you with a character count of -3. Remove punctuation
14. Realize you've haven't left any room to include the hashtag(s), URL or reference the speaker
    
15. Glance at the clock and realize you're only a little more than 10 minutes into the presentation with over an hour left to go

As these things go, I did refine my technique as I went along. For starters, I resorted to typing and formatting my tweets in TextEdit before pasting them into Twitter. I quickly let go of the idea that I would be able to blog presentations in their entirety. As the day worn on, after the haze of information overload began to set in, I also noticed that focusing in on elements that related closely to the topics I knew best (however disjointed from the actual focus of the topic being presented) resulted in more meaningful commentary on my behalf. Where this point is concerned, this meant that many of my latter posts focus on the loosely related topics of music and techno-pop culture.

So, what did I get out of my experience at Convergence 09? A reaffirmation of my belief that the web holds the potential to place the power of mass media in the hands of the people, people like you and me who now have the ability to participate in real time discussions (so widespread that they start trending on Twitter - woohoo!) that contain content that is potentially inaccurate, incomplete, gramatically incorrect and littered with personal bias. Of course the idea is that our combined comments will provide an accurate depiction of the facts.

View the results of my first experience with live blogging on Twitter

View the complete #cvg09 discussion