Twitter at AAS #aas217

twitter logoAAS_Star_Logo_75_blackTwitter is useful to astronomers for many things, but one thing that stands out to me is information sharing at conferences. You don’t have to tweet or even register on twitter to follow the action, just search for #aas217: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=#aas217

Twitter at conferences works best if there’s a critical mass of people tweeting useful info and if those tweets are easy to find. (Although I was the only one tweeting from Cool Stars 16 and it resulted in several useful conversations and thanks from people not at the meeting #cs16.)

On the first point about useful tweets, I’ll quote myself from last year,

Examples of useful tweets would be: a talk your looking forward to, along with a time and room; big results you just found out about; and posters that should not be missed, along with landmarks (e.g., back right corner, across from the Spitzer booth). Other useful things for talk hoppers would be letting people know about schedule changes and how many minutes behind a session is.

On the second, please use the hashtag #aas217. Even though #aas won last year and #aas217 is three characters longer, #aas217 is more specific and is officially endorsed by the AAS Press Office. Also, there’s a fair amount of noise with the #aas tag…not sure what it is since most of it is not in english…maybe football/soccer?

Also, AstroBetter will have a poster on Monday (145.03). Want to meet the contributors or curious about our stats or the demographics of our readers? Come find us! I’ll be busy with organizing the professional development workshops (which still have room!) but will try to spend time as much at the poster as possible. There might even be some extra special AstroBetter swag for our loyal readers and new recruits!

Looking forward to seeing you and reading your tweets from Seattle!

7 comments… add one
  • Doug Burke Jan 25, 2011 @ 16:01

    What I’d like to see is the AAS press office archive the tweets for each conference. Whilst the number of tweets from #aas215 wasn’t that large, you could do some amusing things [*], such as look at when the posts happened (you could tell when the AAS party happened 😉 With a long-term archive you could think about doing something actually useful. Another option would be to use a service like http://twapperkeeper.com/.

    [*] which I never got around to writing up 🙁

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