Twitter provides the benefit of a backchannel — but if it goes down, there are other tools that can be used for conferences such as Coveritlive.com — or feeding conference audio into Live Classroom or Elluminate or Second Life or Ustream.

By focusing on the importance of network-building and pointing out that Twitter is just one of many tools - Skype, MSN, IRC, Groups, Discussion lists — you take the focus off the tool and put it back on the network.

I have also had Twitter let me down during conferences and it is frustrating. But if you don’t shrug and move on you run the risk of focusing on the wrong stuff.

Consider appointing someone to run the live blogging, podcasting, qik-ing or however a conference is covered so people participating and speaking can be free to tweet, flickr, qik or just talk to the person next to them.

Cheers

KerryJ

RE: “There’s gotta be a lot of ground in between those two polls, ground occupied by open source, consortial approaches, .edu-wide approaches. Identifying more precisely which applications truly need net-wide scale to prosper versus those which, while they may benefit from such scale, don’t absolutely require it.”

Amen, brother. Identify what pieces can be small and distinct (ie, can come from other diverse sources, like other blogs) and then set up a collection point that gathers the diverse sources of information. At the risk of stating the obvious, the collection point is the piece that will need to scale — but on the off-chance that a well designed and well tested system does have issues you will at least have recourse.

Open source tools, used effectively, can plug the gap here.

And we should be doing more than that - finding middle ground between trying to be full-fledged ISPs (and doing a mediocre job of it at best, acting as lead zepplins to innovation at worst) and outsourcing it all to too-often flaky startups. There’s gotta be a lot of ground in between those two polls, ground occupied by open source, consortial approaches, .edu-wide approaches. Identifying more precisely which applications truly need net-wide scale to prosper versus those which, while they may benefit from such scale, don’t absolutely require it. Approach, as a not small *community*, some providers to find ways that their solutions can actually accommodate some higher ed concerns. And, ultimately, shrug our shoulder sometimes too. That seems fair if frustrating.

(And… I am still convinced that if a few ‘connectors,’ yourself included, left twitter for another service, you could cause the vast majority of the edu-network to follow. How do you think they all found their way there in the first place?)

I guess anytime we are planning to use Web 2.0, we need a contingency plan. We need to diversify our Web 2.0 use to make it more secure. It’s a basic concept in finance, why not use it elsewhere?