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We all know that if it's 140 characters it must be Twitter. Jeff Pulver organized The 140 Character Conference, held June 16-17 in New York City. There are future conferences in the works, to be held in Los Angeles and London.
Pulver's description of the conference:
The schedule for this two day event was unique and fast paced. It was my intention to provide a platform for as many people as possible to share their thoughts and engage in conversation with the attending delegates. You will find individual talks set to: 10 minutes; “Featured talks” 15 and 20 minutes and the various panel discussions are set for 15 and 20 minutes.
The format set up by Pulver seemed to bring about as much conversation as Twitter itself has. Aliza Sherman, writing at Web Worker Daily in The 140 Character Conference, or Why Twitter Matters Now commented,
There was as much grumbling about the Twitter-style format of the 140 Character Conference in New York this week as there often is about 140-character limit in Twitter itself. Anything new or different can drive some people up the wall. Others, however, embrace the newness and the challenge of doing something completely different, and that is where the conference broke new ground, or at least it felt like that to many of us.
She wrote her observations about the conference in the post. It's worth your time to check them out.
Connect with Your Teens was there. In her post Twitter 140 Characters Conference Highlights she wrote,
The number one highlight of the conference was the panel on TV newsers. Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) was the moderator and Ann Curry (@AnnCurry) and her producer were there as well as Rick Sanchez (@ricksanchezcnn) and his colleague from CNN. What a heated and intelligent discussion. CNN had been criticized over the past weekend for not covering the Iran election protests enough. Twitter took the lead in this coverage, so much so that the U.S. State Department asked twitter to postpone a scheduled shutdown for maintenace. Rick Sanchez was very loud and persistent in his defence of CNN. Scoble said that twitter won't take over the news media but will force it into a smaller role. Ann Curry has become my new idol. Every word out of her mouth was gold.
Connect with Your Teens is not the only attendee who was impressed with Ann Curry's remarks. Jackie Danicki blogged about the conference in 140 Characters Conference, NYC - day one. She managed a photo with Ann Curry and linked to more about what Curry had to say in this article by Gillian Reagan in the New York Observer. Reagan quoted Curry:
Ms. Curry had just returned from Iran to tape an hour-long special titled "Inside Iran" for Dateline NBC, which aired Sunday night. Ms. Curry blogged her coverage for Dateline’s site, took pictures during her tour and, of course, Twittered.
"There is a set of rules,” she said about her “real-time” reporting. “I feel a great obligation never to Twitter something that is wrong."
Annie at banannie trippin' wrote about the cost in We The Tweeple. She said,
Of course, I realize that with a $1000+ price tag and a very business-centric schedule this conference wasn’t made for the everyday users, it was made for marketers and PR people.
But if people don’t get Twitter, and therefore don’t use Twitter, who are all those marketers and PR folks going to talk to?
Rachel Skiar on Flickr seems to share those sentiments about cost, as her photo shows.
You can see the live stream of tweets from the conference at 140 Characters Conference Live on social approach. The speakers, AKA the characters, at the conference are listed with their Twitter names on the conference site. (We at BlogHer tend to look at gender ratios at conferences like this one. I didn't actually count them to get a ratio of male to female, but the representation of women looked pretty good to me.)
Twitter has become important whether we like it or not, whether we "get it" or not. I think even people who don't want to use Twitter need to learn how to get on the web and follow a twitter hashtag during important events. I won't be surprised to see more Twitter themed conferences in the future.
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Virginia DeBolt
BlogHer Technology Contributing Editor
Web Teacher
First 50 Words
