Half Thoughts and Twitter Notes at Custard In The Ether

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Half Thoughts and Twitter Notes

By admin | July 8, 2009

At last month’s Amplified Individuals and Business Resilience event at NLab I tried an experiment: I took my notes using Twitter for the first half of the afternoon, and by hand on paper (gasp - yes, paper!) for the second half.

I have previously blogged about the experience of writing blog posts as a form of note taking as a talk or session progresses. These can then be reviewed, restructured, edited/checked over before publishing at the end of said session or a short while later. I found this very useful as it made sure I actually used my notes constructively (rather than leaving them on scraps of paper, never daring to decipher them) and also enabled me to process and structure my thoughts and observations more usefully.

I suppose I rather naively thought that using Twitter for note taking would be a similar experience. I opened Tweetdeck and prepared to tweet…

I was quite surprised by how difficult I found this. I started writing several tweets, but found that I didn’t have the time to craft these into coherent statements before the next wonderful nugget of an idea came. I then didn’t have the space to jot this down and come back to the original tweet. The result was that lots of ideas didn’t make it into my notes because they were only half thoughts.

I was also reticent about tweeting with quotes from the speakers because I couldn’t get things down accurately quickly enough to feel confident about attributing them (as etiquette on Twitter demands). When I was drafting blog posts live, I was able to take down the jist of a good quote, then effectively unpack it and write/discuss the concept behind it in my own words. There is not the time and space to do this when taking notes in Twitter.

As soon as I started taking my notes by hand, I felt overwhelmingly more relaxed and engaged with the talks. However, my handwritten notes have remained in this form and have not usefully contributed to the discussion around the event. In fact, now I come to think of it, I can’t remember where those notes are…. I need hash tag recall on all my paper work really!

In retrospect, what I needed to do was a combination of twittering and blogging - write the blog post, getting ideas clear and developed in my head, then tweet with short insights based on these notes. However, this feels almost like it goes against the “live” element of Twitter, no matter how intrusive this might be if taken to the extreme in this way. I suspect this comes from my experience of using Twitter for @bathcsc - where the information was time critical and therefore needed to be out instantly, rather than after a delay for review and reflection - the latter being more appropriate for conferences, where crafting time is important if you want to generate high quality tweets to add to the conversation.

I think my next conference experiment will be to combine writing notes as working draft blog posts, as was successful before, but encompassing tweet drafting within this. The conversational element of engaging via Twitter will have to take place between sessions (or in any unlikely moments of boredom) to avoid both being distracted and a distraction.

As with most of this stuff, it is just a case of balancing the real world with the digital dimension….