I like reading Andrew McAfee’s blog. I’ve known him for some years now, and count him as one of my friends. Reading his blog is a bit like chewing on good chillies or drinking decent sancerre, there’s a lot of value in the aftertaste. It lingers, pleasurably, and makes you think.

A few days ago he posted this: The Good and Bad Kinds of Crowd. It was all about prediction markets, something I’m deeply interested in. Tom Malone and his crew over at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence are doing some really good work in this field, do take a look if you’re interested in the subject.

Back to Andy’s post. While it was primarily about prediction markets, there was a distinct and separate makes-you-think aftertaste:

Do you have any tips on how to be a good Twitter-assisted public speaker?

So I put that on my back burner. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, primarily in the context of education, and I wanted to step back and think again in the public speaking context.

And forgot all about it.

Then, this evening, I was reading Gary Hamel on The Facebook Generation vs the Fortune 500. Gary makes some useful observations on the reasons for the “versus”. He proposes a dozen “work-relevant characteristics of online life”, which I list below:

All ideas compete on an equal footing
Contribution counts for more than credentials
Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed
Leaders serve rather than preside
Tasks are chosen, not assigned
Groups are self-defining and -organising
Resources get attracted, not allocated
Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it
Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed
Users can veto most policy decisions
Intrinsic rewards matter most
Hackers are heroes

Gary prefaces this list by saying “In assembling this short list, I haven’t tried to catalog every salient feature of the Web’s social milieu, only those that are most at odds with the legacy practices found in large companies.” And that resonated with me, it resonated with the findings that Andy had made while observing us at the bank during his early Enterprise 2.0 research.

Which brought me full circle to his question. How does a public speaker make good use of Twitter? And this is where I found myself:

1. Twitter is a hecklebot

A hecklebot is “A device that allows audiences to provide feedback to speakers using wireless technology to tie into an open IRC line”.  I’ve been partial to hecklebots ever since I first saw Joi Ito talk about it, use it, demo it in 2004. [I’m convinced that there is a lot of value to be gained in using hecklebots in primary and secondary education, but more of that later. That’s a whole another post.]

2. Twitter is a backchannel

This is what Wikipedia has to say:

Backchannel is the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside live spoken remarks. The term was coined in the field of Linguistics to describe listeners’ behaviours during verbal communication, Victor Yngve 1970.

The term “backchannel” generally refers to online conversation about the topic or the speaker. Occasionally backchannel provides audience members a chance to fact-check the presentation.

First growing in popularity at technology conferences, backchannel is increasingly a factor in education where WiFi connections and laptop computers allow students to use ordinary chat like IRC or AIM to actively communicate during class.

Roo Reynolds has a worthwhile piece about backchannels at the recent SXSW. [Note to self. You were born in the wrong country to be at Yasgur’s farm. You’re past it now,  officially too old to go to Burning Man. You haven’t been to one SXSW as yet. Must try harder.]

3. Twitter allows rich context to be embedded and replayed

If you go to the Roo Reynolds post I refer to above, you will see a link to the video I show a still from. Hearing the podcast is one thing. Watching a Youtube video is a little better. But watching the video with a backchannel overlay is something else. A much richer experience.It’s like smelling the burger van at the soccer ground, you get the ambient intimacy that Clay Spinuzzi talks about.

4. Twitter is my teleprompter

A teleprompter (or autocue) assists presenters by spitting out predefined scripts on to a visual display. What Twitter is capable of doing is something richer. It can make this process interactive, by allowing the audience to influence the “script”.  Think of it as what would have happened if the Cluetrain gang had designed the first teleprompter.

5. Twitter is my ambient tag cloud collector

With tools like Wordle, one could take the RSS feed for tweets related to a conference (ostensibly using appropriate hashtags or equivalent), get them Wordled and shown up on a screen that the presenter can see.

I think there’s a lot that can be done. The hecklebot and backchannel are both great inventions, but they lack one thing that twitter has in spades. Accessibility. You don’t have to be a geek to tweet. Which means that people are more inclined to participate in what you’re doing. [If, as a public speaker, you don’t want people to participate in what you’re doing, I would suggest you take up time-travel. Backwards of course. You’re in the wrong century].

There’s another big thing about using Twitter as the backchannel. Questions and comments are constrained to 140 characters. Which means that the speaker finds them easy to assimilate.

Also, as I’ve tried to show with the Wordle example, the presenter can sense the mood of the crowd by looking at the tag cloud created by the tweets. And tailor what she’s saying accordingly.

The presenter gets valuable feedback loops, questions, directions, atmosphere. Participants get simpler and easier access and embedded context. Absentees get to feel the atmosphere as an overlay on the video. There’s something for everyone.

Just musing.

Incidentally, somewhere in Andy’s post, he mentions that “Pistachio” Laura Fitton will be observing his class and commenting on their tweeting. The last two times I met Laura (who knows more about twitter than anyone else I know), Andy was present at one of the occasions and Chris Brogan(who knows a great deal about social media and public participation) at the other.

So Andy, Laura, Chris, what do you think? Am I making any sense?

This past month or so, I’ve been absolutely delighted with the sheer splendour of the web, the incredible richness and diversity of stuff out there. And all so easy to get to. Here are a few of the sites I’ve really enjoyed, mainly arrived at via Twitter or StumbleUpon. Some I’ve come across before, some I’ve visited for the first time. They all share one thing though: they gave me enormous pleasure:

Lego Art: Where Christoph Niemann struts his stuff. Lighthearted, enjoyable, a whole new way to look at New York.

Scanwich A fine collection of cross-sectional photographs of sandwiches; the Katz’s deli helpings look as enormous as ever.

Radiology art The hamburger shot was interesting, as was the cellphone. But this clamshell stole the show for me.

Red Chillies: One of my favourite cookery blogs, written simply and beautifully

I know it’s going to take a while for people to figure out the right things to do about intellectual property on the web, but I do wish they’d hurry up. Just look at the stuff that’s out there despite the poor laws.

Do you ever look at a bird or a tree and wonder “I wish I knew more about it”? I’m useless with birds. Probably even more useless with trees. In some ways it is strange: I could close my eyes and name more trees and more birds than many other people, I have an excellent vocabulary in that context. But when it comes to connecting the word with the real thing, my knowledge is poor.

I used to tell myself it was because I grew up in a concrete jungle. But after a few visits to India I realised this wasn’t true, every city I visited had its fair share of trees and birds and plants and flowers and fruit and I didn’t know which was which.

Now, as I grow older, I live in hope. I live in hope that soon I will have the tools to do something about my ignorance. In fact I look forward to a time when I can indulge myself and learn about all the things in nature I know so little about it.

Some time ago I was looking through the iPhone app store and I noticed this:

iBird Explorer. Everything you always wanted to know about birds, sitting there in the palm of your hand.

Well, almost everything. Because tools like iBird can sometimes have what I’ve heard described as the dictionary problem. If you want to know how to spell something, where do you go? The dictionary. And what do you need to know in order to use the dictionary? The spelling of the word. Mmm-hmm. Don’t get my drift? Imagine someone wondering how to spell “diarrhoea”.

So I thought to myself. IBird Explorer is great, it’s a fantastic looking app, and I’ll buy a copy as soon as they have one for Berkshire or Southern England or even the UK. But wouldn’t it be nice if we could merge the functionality of iBird with that of Shazam?

I love Shazam, I’ve enjoyed using it ever since it came out, in the days when all you had to do was call 2580 and point the phone at where the music was playing. As they say on their site:

That’s what I want to be able to do. Identify a tree or a flower simply by pointing a phone at it and tapping “tag”. Identify a bird simply by letting the phone hear its call and tapping “tag”.

It’s going to happen. Sean Park, an erstwhile colleague and a good friend of mine, used to wax lyrical about the “future”, a time when everyone had powerful devices in their hands, devices that could be used to crowdsource information about all kinds of things, starting with the weather and climate. He saw the power of GPS-meets-camera-meets-computer-in-your-hand a long time before it became real. Well, that future is here. Now.

We spend too much time worrying about all the Big Brother things that can happen to us because of the Web. CCTV Nation, that sort of thing.

Have you read the papers recently? Don’t you think we’ve had enough bad news for a while? Don’t you think, perhaps we’ve had a teensy bit too much bad news? Just a teensy bit?

So I’m going to spend time dreaming dreams and seeing visions, of the things that could be, of the things that could be soon.

Like having a Shazam for birds and trees and flowers. When the power of portable computing meets the power of ubiquitous connectivity to do more useful things.

And it’s not just about birds and trees. It’s about cars and planes and dogs and cats and fruit and flowers. Yes, and people too. Which raises all kinds of privacy questions, but we might as well get used to answering them. Because it’s going to happen.

Point. Click. Press “tag”. Get the sound or image analysed. Match the pattern. Get the answer.

[Incidentally, today we can talk about sound or image. Tomorrow we will be able to add smell and texture to that list, as sensors get cleverer.]

As Linus’s Law says, Given Enough Eyeballs All Bugs Are Shallow. It’s not just about code, it’s about information in general. Sensors everywhere, connected to that great database in the sky. Point. Click. Get the answer.

Some of the reasons I look forward to my retirement. To a time when I can learn more about birds and trees and flowers.