Not long before leaving for SXSW, I had posted some some thoughts and notes about ‘the backchannel’. The timing turned out to be pretty good, since the talk within and around SXSW became pretty much all about the various uses of backchannels during the conference. Twitter (which was discovered by many people at SXSW last year) is the obvious one, but there was the official Meebo chat rooms set up for each panel, plus thousands of blog posts. Cote flatteringly described my post as prescient, but it was only accidentally so. It was really something more like coincidence mixed with common sense.
I’m back from SXSW now, and while I’m still absorbing the things I learned, one highlight for me was seeing and taking part in the massive but very varied uses of backchannels during the event. Wired has a piece about a how ‘Meebo Users Plot Revolt During Dull Panels‘, Perfect Porridge talks about an ‘Audience Revolt at the Metrics Panel‘ and Jeremiah Owyang gives four examples of ‘groundswell’ events at SXSW.
The most talked about event, both during and after, was of course the Mark Zuckerberg / Sarah Lacy keynote. It was Live-blogged by CrunchGear, parodied hilariously by Paul Carr, dissected by News.com, BuzzMachine, Brian Solis, Scoble and, well, everyone. Lessons were learned. There was an instant cartoon. GigaOM attempts to ignore the style and focus on the content, as does Lilly Rockwell. Sarah herself has responded here, but one of the more fascinating piece of analysis I’ve seen so far is the post in which Kee Hinckley wrote up some research on the interview, which includes this video (embedded below) of the Twitter messages sent during the interview, overlaid in near-real time with a video of the event.
I’m particularly glad to have this wonderful resource because I missed the keynote. Our panel was unfortunately scheduled at the same time, but turned out to be quite a different beast. We displayed the official Meebo chat on-screen, for all to see. Dan Heaf, our moderator, took questions from the floor early and often, while several of us were reading and responding to the backchannel chat while it was happening, and weaving it into the panel as we went. The biggest problem was a fairly noticeable lag on the Meebo messages, but I’m very glad we put it up onscreen. It takes courage, and it’s probably easier for a panel than an individual to pay enough attention to it to get the most value from it, but it is something I would do again in an instant.
“coincidence mixed with common sense”? That’s what prescience is.
Knowledge of actions or events before they occur; foresight. Unusual or creative discernment or perception. The power to foresee the future.
I don’t have any of these things. :-)
Nobody has the power to foresee the future or have knowledge of actions or events before they happen. But sometimes people appear to have that knowledge or power, so they can aptly be called prescience.
If you want to go about appearing to have that power or knowledge, the path to follow is a mixture of luck and common sense.
Oh, fair enough. Go on then. :-)
Anyway, you’re too modest, ‘creative discernment’ sounds like it could be you.