Twitter at AAS in Austin #aas219

I don’t tweet much these days (except about #bikenyc) but if there’s one place where I pile on the bandwagon, it’s at conferences, and AAS in particular. I’ve said all of this last year and
the year before last, but I’m going to say it again. And I’ll probably say it again next year.

Twitter is a great live backchannel for comments and questions during talks. Tweets about the conference should have the #aas219 hashtag in them so they are easy to find. I especially like to tweet during the policy-heavy Town Halls and Special Sessions where important and useful info is often lost in the dull of TMA (too many acronyms) and many folks are at lunch. I enjoy reading tweets during the big plenaries because they give me insight into science topics that I’m not super familiar with and there are usually lots of people tweeting. Twitter also makes it possible for people not physically at the conference to join in the discussion. There’s lots of ways to contribute and benefit, but you won’t “get it” until you try it!

You don’t have tweet anything yourself to join in. You can follow the action by just bookmarking this search: http://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/#aas219. But I highly recommend setting up a Twitter app on your handheld device! The apps are generally fast and use very little bandwidth. Most Twitter apps also have a Saved Search feature so you can setup the search for #aas219 once and then just refresh it to get a fresh fix: iOS, Andriod, Blackberry, and mobile for non-smart phones.

One request: To prevent duplicates from crowding up the search results, please use the Twitter retweet function rather than quoting tweets.

I plan to be tweeting as myself, not as @astrobetter. You can follow me and the other contributors:
@kellecruz
@janerrigby
@astrobiased (Eli)
@astrofrog (Tom)

Finally, I highly encourage everybody to attend Jean-Luc Doumont’s talk on Making the Most of Oral Presentation on Monday morning at 10am in Room 18A. He has great advice on everything from what to do with your hands, how to use your voice, and how to design slides. I think it should be a required course for anybody who is speaking in front of others…which is pretty much all of us!

Looking forward to it! Austin Forecast looks great with highs in the 50s and 60s!

5 comments… add one
  • Stuart Jan 8, 2012 @ 19:17

    Rather than try to control the (retweet) behaviour of a bunch of astronomers – a near impossible task – you could just filter out the manual retweets by adding “-RT” to the Twitter search. Any term prefixed with “-” will cause tweets containing the term to be omitted.

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