Twitter: the cure for knowledge greed

We sat huddled over our booklets, anxiously plotting where we would go next. "There are too many to choose from!" I groaned.

"These things make me realize something," replied Jessica Margolin. "I don't have financial greed, I have knowledge greed."

We all do.

We are all here to get the most out of the experts and out of each other. And this year's high presence of technology is making it easier to maximize our knowledge intake.

Twitter is proving most influential. While sitting in one panel, I follow the live updates from others. I capture the most stunning quotes from my session and absorb the most influential in others. Most impressively, people in Panel I are using twitter to ask someone in the audience of Panel II to pose a question to the experts. The answer, of course, appears again on twitter, satisfying even more people's need for information. With twitter, we get a taste of every session, we can maximize our exposure to knowledge, we can be greedy.

And the number of people tweeting is impressive. In the (Financial) Power to the People session moderator Tom Watson asked his audience how many people were twittering. About half of us proudly raised our hands. The whole exchange quickly appeared under #swf09, and the rest of the day featured all sorts of analysis on who is using twitter and how it's helping. The conclusion was captured best by Peter Dietz: "Frankly, there are two conferences going on: one for the tweeters and one for everyone else." Later he added: "The twittering delegates are having a distributed conversation with people here and around the world. The others aren't."

We all have laptops or PDAs or simple cell phones. Why not participate in both SWFs?