Iste13 from a distance

The iste conference had me glued to twitter late Sunday night. The experience of waiting for the key speaker, and then receiving their presentation through the media of a few hundred tweets was a real entertaining and gloriously odd. First came tweets from the queue as people shuffled into the main hall, over looked by a different group gripping at the length of it and the herd mentality. Next came endless excited comments about the 'house band', the thrill of being there and occasional mention of the who the key speaker was. 

As the presentation started the tweets summarised the key points over and over again as each tweeter delivered their individual perspective. For every 20 tweets of diligent relation of the key points would come the occasional voice of decent "not sure a really agree with that". At the virtual back of the room a few 'bloggers' revelled in the fact that a few people were leaving the conference and preferred not to comment of the presentation, "nobody watching the presentation in the blog zone". 

I prodded with tweets of my own, trying to get a deeper response from those present. 

I don't pretend to understand the phenomena any better but the experience did have a tangible unique quality which I can imagine being highly addictive.