Friday, October 9, 2009

#heweb09 Disaster Fun!

I was lucky enough to be following someone on Twitter who was actually attending #heweb09, and consequently putting out some of the best tweets too!

I first noticed a bunch of snarky tweets, which are always intriguing, and then I noticed the hashtag and decided to check it out. I was very amused to find, in real time, a conversation going on about a really shitty ass keynote speaker! The comments painted a picture of him in my mind, despite the fact I couldn't see him, but then someone streamed it live! I got a few chuckles and was amazed at how this new phenomenon was happening. It wasn't just people tweeting about live shit on TV, or some lame crap like that, nor a stadium of tweeters, it was a conference type room with a bunch of intelligent people meeting to learn, and a majority of them were all feeling the same things and the ability to share it quietly with others there.

Akin to passing notes in class, people would discuss how they'd love to leave, but opposed to notes, anyone in the world could read them! The talk started to pick up more and more, and then the bigwigs noticed, showed up and left comments about lynch mobs and how social media doesn't give us the right to heckle others, blah blah, but all in all if someone wants to put themselves out there, they have to be prepared for the consequences, if it wasn't on twitter, it would have been on everyone's blogs the next day anyways!

I did find a follow up blog here, and it actually mentions something I did to have fun after seeing the following tweet:
I saw this and thought damn, wouldn't this be a fun real time social experiment! I rushed to the nearest website I could remember, cafepress.com, made a store, and booted up paint.NET and make a picture, uploaded it onto a shirt, and put it on sale!


The ability to add to a real time joke from thousands of miles away intrigued me! I was watching the fun anyways, so why not try and participate and see what happens?

I was initially scared people would think I'm some sort of scammer/spammer/opportunist, but I wasn't doing this trying to sell shirts, I just wanted to see some people laugh, and show the power of how quickly some joke of a Keynote at a Higher Education Web conference can turn into a global joke where people can already buy merchandise world wide!

I shared the link with bitly, and you can actually see the stats by going here.
The stats are as follows:
187 Total clicks (at time of writing, 170 were on first day)
8 Tweets (2 were from me, and no one actually retweeted me, but made their own tweets linking to the shirt)
and about 150 of those tweets were in the first hour, and 75ish in the first 5 minutes form what I remember!

Anyways, it was pretty fun to add to something from miles away with only about 5 minutes of input, and it's also pretty cool to see quickly rising click counts in seconds and minutes!

The blog I linked to above had a lot of good points and things learned from the conference. I also like that the comments were all pretty smart, well read, and not the general crap you usually see. I lol at the anonymous comment saying how it was bad, and people were mean and idiots and he's glad to be home, I wonder who wrote that? haha!

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