Conference day 1: Baptism by twitter-fire!

Early 4.30 am wake-up.....wanted to get to Hatfield train station just after 6 am to be in Sandton no later than 7 am. While driving to the station, I was surprised to see so many cars on the road at that hour! I am now even more grateful to be living 5 km from work and only having to get up at 6.30 am.

Arrived at the station, loaded the Gautrain card, and got my seat of choice. It was a chilly, quiet and dark winters morning, everyone dressed in coats, scarves and boots, dead-serious and reserved, and combining this with the fog visible outside and the quiet ultra-modern train.....I had a back-on-a-train-in-Europe-in-December feeling.....

(observation: I had eight people in my line of sight on the train; six of them were on their phones: texting, listening to music, or webbrowsing during the whole duration of the trip....mobile connectivity and information sharing is here to stay!)

After disembarking from the train, I bumped into Christelle Steyn from UP, a fellow social reporter at the conference. A welcome bump, as I had never been to the Sandton station or the Sandton Conference Centre before and she was able to lead the way. Registration at the venue was followed by taking our places at a table in the middle of the workshop venue reserved for the social team. Our conference bags were bright and cheerful, the social reporter scarves a special Pavlinka-style red, and the wifi connection up and running and reliable.

My first task of the day was to report via twitter during Michael Stephens' presentation Taming technolust: technology planning in a hyperlinked world. Tweeting during the talk was fun and presented no problems.....this is actually quite an understatement as our #saoim tweeting resulted in our hashtag ending up trending at position number 4 for a while!

                           WAY TO GO SAOIM TWEETERS!!!

From a librarian/delegate's point of view the workshop was a great success; touching on topical issues such as identifying and implementing new technology trends, and ways in which new technologies can be used to better serve users and attract them to the library and its services. Interesting terms such as technodivorce and technoshame were also explained and enjoyed.....we've all had experiences of those feelings and emotions at one point in the workplace!

Many photographs of the speakers as well as delegates were also taken by the social reporters before, during and after the workshop. The social reporters posing proudly with their red scarves were also photographed!

Lunch was followed by Karen Blakeman's workshop titled Personalisation of search: take back control. Karen highlighted a variety of search engines, explained the idiosyncrasies of various search engines, exposed us to ways enabling better search results and techniques to bypass search-engine pitfalls. I found the talk interesting indeed; while listening to her talk I was also spending some time working on this blog posting.

Reflections on training: tweeting

As mentioned earlier, the training day tweeting session while viewing a video-presentation presented its main challenge in the difficulty experienced in trying to keep up with the presenter's talking and slideshow speed.

I also experienced some additional problems:

• twitter.com turned out to be an underperforming platform. I was not able to find the retweet button and not all tweets pertaining to the twitter session showed up on my feed.
• It was suggested that tweetdeck and hootsuite might be applications providing more flexibility and insight.
• I have to confess that I had only ever tweeted on my phone before training day; getting used to tweeting on qwerty was not as easy as expected.
• A very useful suggestion has to be the practise of having an electronic version of the presentation at hand. This would make c+p of key phrases easier, faster and also assist when one has missed out on a section.
• Twitter prep is essential before every session, and would include things like saving the intended hashtags, having a quick look at the abstract or full paper, plus tweeting the intended paper/presenter to follow.

An aspect of specific concern to me would be letting go of my personal tweeting style, which is lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek, opinionated or commentary on a current issue. When it comes to private tweeting, I am prone to tweeting/retweeting arbitrary information such as : "have you seen Novak's new tennis outfit: pajamas!! #aussieopen", or "hee ha another six by tendulkar. #littlemaster" to "respect has to be earned. it does not come with the position. #spear". Attending the conference as a social reporter, and expected to be a professional representative of my employer as well as the profession, would require a definite mindshift in tweeting habits! Serious, respectful, objective, informative, true!

Training day!

The big day finally arrived and most of the volunteers were able to attend. The morning commenced with obligatory coffee and introductions, and Elmi started off by giving some background to the social reporting concept. After that, aspects such as ethics, use of big screens, twitter questions, twitter hashtags, wifi usage, plus some social reporting do's and dont's were covered. The highlight of the morning was a mock-live tweeting session of a video presentation of Michael Stephens titled Hyperlinked libraries. It seemed to be enjoyed by all and when looking at the tweets afterwards, one could clearly notice the different styles of tweeting present in the room! Most were a bit flustered at first by the speed at which Michael was going, and the brevity of his screenshots, but the end-results was a decent conveying of the gist of Michael's presentation. Another significant moment was the unexpected twitter response of Michael to Siphethile, asking what the hashtag #socrt meant and if we were in Africa!

After lunch, the training turned its focus to the use of video in social reporting. The application of meta-analytics and statistics were also investigated. Videos were made by all.....using  a variety of gadgets: phones, ipads and cameras. Video interviews turned out to be harder than anticipated, as I discovered when trying to do a 2-minute 4-question interview with Elmi. We finally got a presentable take on our fourth attempt!

After the training had finished, most people left but I was still struggling to download 111 Flickr pics until way after 5pm. I had actually used a different camera than the one I normally use when doing walkabout photography while travelling, using the Canon 50D instead of the 5D as the former has a built-in flash. The pictures of the day had turned out better than I had expected, especially considering that the 50D is marginally inferior to the 5D.

Elmi had done a great job in exposing us to the expectations, practicalities as well as demands of social reporting during the day's training. With 13 days left before the conference, I felt more confident than I had felt before the training, yet ready and motivated to practice new skills and hone those which I already possess.