Talkin' 'bout my cerebration.

@ashleyproud recently blogged about his perception of virtual conference attendance by following conference hashtags. I am a big fan of this as it enables me to learn from those I trust when they attend conferences that I cannot attend. A great example of this is #ISTE2010 which was held in Denver which I was unable to attend. I had viewed the program and was keenly interested in some of the sessions. More importantly I was interested in some people’s perceptions and interpretations of the sessions.

However I see other functionality for social media to enhance conference attendance. Personally, I use Evernote, Diigo, Dropbox and Twitter as my main tools when attending a conference. Twitter for me serves a dual purpose. If a hashtag is being utilised I can grab other conference attendees thoughts and links as they occur. This is effective in increasing my “take away” from the conferences. I can grab information from sessions I am not in. Before Twitter this was infinitely more difficult. I can also utilise Twitter as a personal notebook. By using hashtags I can store information in a Twitter stream that I access at a later stage. I recently discovered a great archiving tool – The Archivist by Mix Online, tweeted by @agrei8. I’ve used this tool over my mid year holidays to grab tweets from a number of conferences I was unable to attend.

As the conference rolls on, if I see a tweet I want to store for further thought then I will send it into my Evernote account. I can then create a notebook based on the conference and make this notebook public. Public in this case means open read access. Dropbox on the other hand is my preferred option for sharing documents. A link to such documents can be included within the Evernote notebook.

Diigo is also useful. As presenters identify websites and services I can load them into my browser and use Diigo to bookmark them. Within Diigo I can create a public list and send a link in a Tweet when I bookmark. Both of these again allow me to share what I have learnt and gathered. There is also an option within your Diigo setup to automatically copy your bookmarks to your Delicious account. I use this service as a backup for my bookmarking and a way to continue my networking within Delicious also. If a number of Diigo members create a group for the conference, and add links to the group then we have a simple way of accessing an archive of links from the conference.

In this way I can use social media services to enhance my conference attendance.