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Hashtag Noise, Band Width & Simple Sockets: the thorny Challenge of the real-time Back Channel

As more and more reporting – of every kind – makes its way on-line and instantaneously in our new real-time age, those reporting are facing a whole range of new challenges, whether purely technical, involving editorial judgement or simply of cyber-etiquette. In this timely and comprehensive post, Brian Condon reflects on his own experiences of covering last month’s Science on Line 09 at London’s Royal Institution:

It’s very unusual to go to an event where you don’t know anybody at all. But that is exactly what happened to me at Science Online 2009, held at the Royal Institution on 22nd August. Of course, I’ve been following a few people on Twitter from the ‘science blogger’ community which is how I found out about the event in the first place (from @kejames). Most of the attendees were scientists and academics, with representatives from the academic publishing houses and and information providers. I did feel a bit of an outsider, or perhaps the term “interloper” better describes it.

It is always fascinating and useful seeing a community you don’t know dealing with an issue you do know about. So, from a Media140 perspective and, with realtime media in mind, I’ve been thinking about it.

During the event I made an AudioBoo piece about the issues – especially about a really good session on Realtime Statistics.

Second Life as a realtime presentation medium . . . Hmmm

Interesting and odd at the same time was the use of Second Life both as a medium for ‘virtual’ participation and also for a keynote. Dave Munger (www.wordmunger.com) was due to give a keynote in person but discovered, as he completed his packing, that his passport had expired. The organisers suggested that he present in Second LIfe. Brave. I’ve been at events where Second Life has been used – and this is the first time I’ve seen it work (kind of!).

Dave blogged about his Second Life presentation experience for Seed Magazine here. He also said in his opening remarks that he’d tried to add a paunch to his Avatar to make it slightly more ‘realistic’ but that he still considered it too ‘Adonis-like’.

I’ve been following the blog coverage using Twitter links; there has been much debate as to whether it might have been just as effective using Skype video for Dave’s presentation (as was done at the first Media140 event in London). For this presentation, I think it would have been better to see Dave Munger live on video with decent audio. The poor audio quality and link-latency combined with the usually ludicrous SL Avatars detracted from Dave’s message.

His presentation was a powerful and insightful piece of thinking on how scientists can use online media to communicate their ideas and develop (and perhaps risk!) their careers. It may be that the SL experience – if you were participating on SL – was worth having? I had no way of finding out, as the organisers asked us to stay off bandwidth-intensive applications such as video or participating simultaneously in ‘Real’ and ‘Second’ Lives.

Online Media at Science Online 2009

Science Online had multiple media personas.

There’s a whole collection of online content here.

• Second LIfe
• I think there was a stream
• A lot of activity on Friendfeed
• A lot of activity on Twitter using the #solo09 hashtag
• Excellent almost-verbatim live blogging by @allysonlister

Brian Kelly has written about the use of the ‘Back Channels’ and captured some of the statistics about Twitter use in his blog post. He has also done some very interesting thinking on the nature of Twitter as ‘ephemera’.

Kelly also points out a really important aspect of the ‘Multiple Media Personas’ issue:

“The experiences of Science Online 2009 do, however, underscore an additional challenge: the diversity of the back channels. In addition to the Twitter channel, the science community has been an enthusiastic adoptee of FriendFeed and this was popular at the event. Discussions were also taking place on Second Life. As well as the different applications being used there were multiple variants of the event tags: ‘#solo09? on Twitter, ’solo09? on Flickr and ’solondon’ for the name of the FriendFeed room….”

Using Twitter and Scribblelive to ‘curate’ events

I used Scribblelive to combine live blogging and include Twitter contributions. You can see the Scribble live blog here: and the list of contributors here:

I tried to combine elements of the Tweetstream, some of my own notes, some images and other content in real-time, as the event progressed. This process is not for the faint-hearted. It’s analogous to a live production process. I’m evolving what might grandly be called ‘editorial processes’ for this form of live-blogging:
• Try to do something ‘different’ from either ‘near-verbatim’ note-taking as liveblog (ie: what was said) or the nested hierarchical note plus comment structure used by Friendfeed
• Look for potential conversations in the Tweetstream or comments that amplify or ‘shade’ the discussion
• Try not to ‘overthink’ the process but don’t include too much ‘off-topic’ comment on the Back Channel (unless it’s funny!), avoiding references to the Ashes (for example) or pleas to turn off an iPhone alarm that was a source of both great irritation and comment on Twitter
• Try to capture the ‘flavour’ of the event without too much duplication of content; many people Tweeting at events relay what the speaker has just said – generating hashtag ‘noise’

Using this approach in other events (especially social media events) I’ve had good feedback about it. In this case, I’ve had none at all. Maybe it’s because there was so much coverage around the event on blogs and Friendfeed. Maybe it reflects my ‘interloper’ status in that particular community of science communicators and bloggers? Maybe I didn’t add any value over and above the feeds with more ‘official’ links to the event? Maybe I didn’t ‘push’ it enough on Twitter. Looking at the bit.ly tracking stats is instructive and indicates more traffic to the Scribblelive site from the USA than anywhere else (about twice as much).

Realtime stresses the infrastructure at events:
There are two issue that events in the early 21st Century always get wrong:
• Never enough bandwidth
• Always too few power sockets for devices in the meeting spaces

It seems to me that the practical uses of social media in conferences and events are expanding faster than the technical infrastructure can cope with. This leads to organisers making requests to attendees to ‘go easy on the network’ and to attendees getting frustrated as they try to cover events in realtime. The problem is intractable for most events so this is not a criticism of Science Online. Indeed, I AudioBooed about the power issue in June (http://audioboo.fm/boos/29506-more-power-igor-rant). But we keep slogging away hoping that the infrastructure will eventually catch up and that the audience for social media covering events will actually be there.