I was just reading Jesse Stay’s post over at Stay-n-Alive and he brought up some really interesting points regarding how social media is being used at events. Whether its ChaCha or Twitter, the time where people can be useful to one another from afar at such high efficiency is most definitely here. I used ChaCha for a time and despite it being dreadful at finding the Sundance wiki of which Justin Keller spoke, it would seem to find things a bit more effectively at least in the mobile space. I intend to take note of it on my phone and use it in the future in conjunction to texting Google to test its resourcefulness. I intend to report back on what I find.
As to what Jesse mentioned in his post, I came a bit late to the game in actually tracking Sundance but it was truly an odd experience but one I intend to repeat herein for events that I’m either nearby or in actual attendance. Combined with Colleen Coplick’s hilarious tirade on her job description to Sperling Reich’s excellent choice in podcasts the chance to meet people who use Twitter outside of Utah was a new experience for me, one which I desire to do on a regular basis. Whenever I try to sell Twitter to someone I specifically mention how it can change an event, but of course I’m the kind of guy who wouldn’t mind sitting at the back of an event making comments via IRC (or Twitter which is becoming to be known IRC 2.0).
All of that aside, one story in particular caught my eye… Morbid as it may seem Heath Ledger’s death spread like wildfire amongst the masses at not only Sundance but throughout Twitter. I used to get up to date news like this via Digg, but I feel that Twitter is faster and certainly more mobile. One point of view was from someone standing in line at a Coffee Shop who read the news aloud from his mobile to the disbelief of fellow festival goers. Presumably this was from Twitter (it could have easily been via e-mail on a blackberry), dreary as all this is it means that bad news now has the ability to travel even faster and more virally.
