Computers in Libraries 2008 will be the first big conference I have attended since I stated using Twitter and I’m interested to see how it will work as a backchannel, liveblog outlet, etc. I’d like to see how the following things work in terms of Twitter and conferences

Hashtags

A hashtag is a keyword preceded by a hash or “#” sign. It’s a way of marking a tweet with a tag in a similar way that you might tag a Flickr photo or del.icio.us bookmark. Theoretically, a person could use hashtags for all kinds of tagging in Twitter. Most of the time, there’s no real point in tagging a 140-character message.

Tagging for a conference makes sense to me, though, because you might want to see what’s going on in that place and time without having to follow a whole bunch of new people. You might not even know what people to add even if you wanted to. The hashtag adds a hook for an aggregator–like the CIL Netvibes page I made–to latch on to.

There is a catch, though. If you want http://hashtags.org/ to find those tweets you tag and display them on the http://hashtags.org/tag/cil2008/ page, you have to follow http://twitter.com/hashtags on Twitter (they’ll follow you back almost immediately; once they do that, you are ready). So that setup step makes it just a little more cumbersome.

There is the added baggage that some people just hate the hashtags. I guess I’d feel similarly if people habitually sprinkled them in all kinds of tweets, but for the purpose of collecting tweets around a specific event, I think they are fine. Any hashtag haters out there?

CIL2008 account

Michael Sauers set up a CIL2008 Twitter account. I think the idea is to check in on the CIL2008 with friends and see what all those CIL folks are up to. (If I have misunderstood that, someone please set me straight.)

The problem there is that I’m sure even during the conference the friends of CIL20008 will be tweeting about things other than the conference itself. It gets even more complicated if CIL2008 has friends who aren’t actually present at the conference.

Privacy

Another possible monkey wrench here is that many librarians keep their Twitter account “protected” or private so that only followers they approve can see their tweets. I’m not going to argue that that is a bad thing, just that it will make them invisible when it comes to this kind of keeping up with an event via Twitter thang.

One way around that, of course, is to create a separate public account to use for events, like Iris Jastram has done with her pegasuslibrn account.

Or you could just relax and not worry about it. It’s only Twitter, after all.