But this whole twitter-during-conference thing is an interesting phenomenon.  On one side, it’s rude – typing instead of listening, talking about the speaker as if they aren’t even there – and yet on the other side it creates a whole backchannel of information.  Sure, there are the usual idiots – you can’t fill a room with educated geeks, lawyers, and businessmen without finding some are actually 4-year olds once you give them anonymity – but it serves it’s own niche, and has it’s own culture.

I mean think about it.   By participating in the #communia hashtag, I met, virtually, other twitter users who follow the same topics, and now have a greater source of noise – I mean information with which to use.  These conventions – hash tagging, tracking by subject, forming a backchannel community of shared knowledge to be referenced later – all came together through the designs of users, not admins in the ivory office of tweeting.  And further, it’s become pervasive enough that it has been recognized as socially acceptable, not rude, and papers exist on how to maximize the microblog backchannel!  This is despite the heckling!  Emergent phenomena indeed.

And to what effect does this have?  It depends on your point of view.  I’ll say that in the afternoon, when most attendees lost internet access, I found it much easier to concentrate on the speaker’s content and not what my fellow attendees were saying.  But, I also was not gaining the oft-cited value of what the other people felt was important – and what sucked -  through their comments and what they chose to broadcast to their personal twitterstream.

Indeed, if I really wanted to get technical I could go in and see what the different types of twitter ‘animals’ there are… or you could.