Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Robin Lloyd and Cristine Russell tell an increasingly familiar story: Twitter and friends take over a journalism conference, overwhelm the audience at first and eventually convert them to the social media gospel. This time around, at ScienceWriters 2009, a few interesting wrinkles emerged.
A taxonomy of social bookmarking: “Digg.com operates like a gang, Harris said, with stories or links nominated by super-users tending to rise in the ranks; meanwhile Reddit.com is like an “ADHD direct democracy” in which any link can make it to the top rankings, but popular links turn over rapidly.”
A new program tells you which conference tweets to care about: “One innovative new Twitter tool that Purdue University researchers unveiled earlier this month was made available for use at ScienceWriters 2009. Designed to help make sense of the wave of Twitter traffic at a meeting or conference, a new site called Need4Feed sorts through the tweets at a meeting and builds a popularity ranking to identify those with the broadest appeal. Developer Kyle Bowen, director of informatics at Purdue, said in a university press release that ‘Need4Feed lets conference goers sift through the noise to find the important things being said.’”
