This October's TFPL SharePoint Summit certainly left delegates with much to ponder following an event focused on the nitty gritty of Sharepoint implementations, designed to give us an insight beyond popular hype surrounding the product. But how will they reflect on their experience at the Summit?
Before this October I had a somewhat negative opinion of such things as Twitter and "smart phones" which I had discounted as gimmicky distractions conducive to naught but pointless chit-chat. Julian Birkinshaw, during his inspirational reinventing management presentation at this October's ebic (Connect with the Future), asserted that the most committed and effective employees are also those who tend to be most active on social media at work. My experience over the last two weeks has certainly acted to cement this view.
I watched somewhat outraged as my colleague, James Lappin, and my new buddy, KPMG's Thöre Donner, were furiously hammering away at their respective notebook and Blackberry keyboards; I thought they were answering emails during the proceedings! However, after a little investigation I realised they were actually twittering their thoughts on each presentation!
Their method certainly, hands down, topped my antiquated and tedious pen and paper note taking. In fact, after subscribing to twitter and becoming a "follower" of one "JamesLappin" and a "ThoreDonner", their "tweets" served to join the dots on the puzzle which were my notes. Whether this was simply down to the fact that I am not a very good note taker or not, I decided at that moment that I will not be a spectator in this, the mobile version of the "personal media" revolution introduced by Paul Saffo at ebic.
Aside from being a useful point of personal reference, like a kind of public day to day diary, Twitter can serve to extend your network and broadcast information to thousands of peers. For example, Ewan McIntosh's live blogging and twittering of Paul Saffo's keynote piece at ebic attracted an audience of 6000 people in addition to the 70 delegates who were present, increasing its reach almost 100 times and on a global scale. Ewan wrote this blog live at ebic. Interestingly, James Lappin mentioned to me that, this may also raise the possibility of future conference speakers being selected on the basis of their popularity on social computing media...
Anyway, here's how Twitter works: I literally just clicked the search function on twitter, typed "Sharepoint" into the search field and hit enter. I am now viewing, in chronological order, what thousands of people are pondering about SharePoint. If I think that person is interesting, I will choose to follow him or her and will subsequently receive their tweets on my homepage feed. The concept is known as microblogging, so the premise behind it is that you should keep your thoughts concise with a maximum of 140 characters per blog. But there is no limit to the number of blogs you can post. So if you're at a SharePoint Summit, for example, I can search sharepoint and tune into your sentence by sentence report. Here are some examples of what I picked up from James and Thöre's tweets during the proceedings:
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