What a morning! I came to the first session of O'Reilly's Tools of Change Conference with two goals: Learn stuff and get a job. Not necessarily in that order.
So I go to the tutorial by "Twitter-famous" author Chris Brogan (aka @chrisbrogan) and I do what I do at conferences and other events - I tweet.
So I see he's got a screen up behind him but he's not at the computer. So I type a tweet, but I wait.
Then, at exactly the right moment it turned out. I struck. I posted this tweet:
Wonder if @chrisbrogan will be psyched or annoyed at me for plugging "Hire thisguychad.com " ... seriously, I'm available ;-) #toc
Then he went to his computer and updated the #toc stream, and there I was, on the big screen, fourth down, for like a half an hour.
But that didn't feel like enough. So I whipped out my flip-cam and went closer up in the room so I could capture the moment on video.
Done. But now what?
YouTube!!
So I log in to my TubeMogul.com account, uploaded the video, tagged it, and "launched" it into my YouTube account.
So I then want to tell the world what I did, cause that's what you can do with YouTube and Twitter, so I used the Firefox is.gd URL shortener to fit the link into a tweet.
Then, to my amazement, I hear Chris mention how great a Flip video camera is and what you can do with it.
So, as someone who has attended my share of conferences and enjoyed enhancing the conversation with tips from my unique perspective, I chimed in with my YouTube link.
One problem though, the link was bad. D'OH!
So Chris tries to show off this very meta moment, and it goes to the wrong page. Then, my wireless goes down RIGHT THEN so I can't update.
Nightmare.
I take some well-deserved ribbing for "side-swiping" him during the workshop, but we eventually get back on track.
Meantime, @suzaxtell tries to re-tweet my tweet, but there were two problems, one she wrote @Chad Capellman which doesn't link to my twitter account, and she re-tweeted the broken link.
I think I'll be looking back at this exchange a lot. It highlighted a lot of elements of the immediacy of social media tools, what can be done with them, and how easily things can run off the side of the road without meaning to or even sometimes being aware that it happened until it's too late.
Click here for notes from this session. Like I said, what a morning!!
