the future of the backchannel?

There was quite a timely piece in C|net today about backchannels at tech-related conferences. See "How to survive the next-gen confab . It comes at a time when we're close to wrapping together a set of on-line venues for MW2008.

This will be the third year we've had an on-line space for MW while it was taking place, and afterwards. it seems that this might be the year that it takes off a bit more. If you're out and about on the Web, check out the following

• our flickr group: mw2008 [join and add your pics -- that's what's at the top of conference.archimuse.com]
• our #mw2008 twitter tag [use it in your tweets]
• the mw2008 twitter page ["follow you, follow me"]
• the mw2008 assembled from onetag, and RSS aggregator that's grabbing blog postings, photos, tweets, whatevery... it's mike ellis' newest venture [that's also populating our right menu on conference.archimuse.com]
• there are also Facebook and Upcoming pages for the meeting, but they've been mostly about announcements.

We're also trying a Second Life Critic in the crit room for the first time. While i've been pretty adamant that conferences are about conversation -- yes even more than they are about sessions -- these all seem to be ways to faciilitate interchange amongst delegates without getting in the way.

we'll see. have some fun. experiment. and please, say works and what doesn't ...

see you soon!

/jt