First, here is a quick graph of hourly posting frequency…

Tweets per hour at MIT6

Naturally, there is a skewed distribution of the 1009 tweets recorded here. The top tweeters were as follows:

1. Derek Kompare (d_kompare), 82
2. Elisabeth Jones (eaj6), 78
3. Lisa Lynch (liesell), 77
4. Tim Anderson (loganpoppy), 70
5. laura47, 51
5. Kathleen Fitzpatrick (kfitz), 51
7. John Maxwell (jmaxsfu), 50
8. Rick Prelinger (footage), 43
9. beyondbroadcast, 39
10. { jlr } (j_l_r), 32

The most frequently referenced twitter users in the tweets (i.e., referenced by @) were:

1. @footage, 23
2. @kfitz, 19
3. @joshgreen, 16
4. @d_kompare, 11
4. @halavais, 11
4. @dkompare, 11
7. @liesell, 9
7. @NiemanLab, 9
7. @jeanburgess, 9
10. @eaj6, 8

Finally, here is the wordl-generated word cloud of comments only, excluding most user-names, urls, and other cruft.

What does all this mean? Does it amount to a hill of beans? Well, I’m still processing and trying to decide.

I know what @mamamusings would say: stop flooding me :). She thinks a regular chat channel (IRC, etc.) is more appropriate for conference and event tweeting. I can see why this might be the case, but the function of tweeting is, I think, different from that of chat.

Tweeting a conference is a lot like live-blogging a conference, but on a smaller scale. Now, I know a lot of people are not a fan of live-blogging conferences, and, frankly, few people do it well. I know I don’t. The times I have tried have met with modest success, at best. The advantage to Twitter is that it gives you a chance to publish very lightly considered ideas in real time. Is the signal-to-noise ratio on this high? No. But I’m not sure it’s any lower than that of the standard paper being delivered.

The advantage to Twitter over a dedicated discussion channel is that you get to share not just with those who are there, but with those who are not. One of the striking features of the hashtag stream is that a lot of the messages are from those who wish they were there. If nothing else, the stream served as good advertising for the conference.

It also let me know, at a bare skeletal level, what was going on at other panels. I really wish, though, that there had been more content-rich postings. When I look over my own postings, I can’t say that I contributed much on this side. It’s worth considering though: the MiT conference seemed to be pretty dense in terms of tweets given its size. Interesting to know whether that will happen at other conferences or if it was just a particularly tweety conf.