Event-based conversation fragmentation (and tag fragmentation) - how will YOU interact online during Oracle OpenWorld 2008?

There has been discussion ad nauseum about one aspect of conversation fragmentation - namely, the example where comments to a blog post are dispersed in all sorts of different places other than the blog.

But what about conversation fragmentation in relation to an event?

I am thinking, of course, about Oracle OpenWorld 2008, and the online places where people will discuss OpenWorld-related items.

If you recall, back during Oracle OpenWorld 2007 I was a big proponent of Twitter. See my September pre-conference post on business twittering and Oracle OpenWorld 2007, and my Twitter-sourced posts on Larry Ellison's keynote, Tom Kyte's presentation, and Andy Mendelsohn's keynote. In retrospect, I guess the major takeaways from my Oracle OpenWorld 2007/Twitter experience are:

1. Aggregation tools (perhaps an aggregating Twitter account, perhaps a hashtag, perhaps a search) allow you to get multiple views of the event.


2. If many of your Twitter followers don't care about the event, your tweets may bring you grief.

But a lot has happened in the online world since November 2007, when Oracle OpenWorld 2007 was held. In my personal case, the emergence of FriendFeed, as well as the emergence of the mobile client fftogo, have had a tremendous impact in how I interact online. Despite my high 92/100 Twitter Grade, the fact is that I don't really interact much via Twitter any more. Oh, perhaps I interacted some during the last Redskins game, and perhaps I'll use Twitter to fire comments into the cloud, but much of my true interaction takes place via my ontarioemperor FriendFeed account.

While I'll probably tweet some from my @oemperor Twitter account, and I'll probably monitor (and contribute to) the @oow Twitter account, I've set up things for a possible FriendFeed-centric interaction with Oracle OpenWorld 2008. Specifically, I have not only joined Eddie Awad's Oracle OpenWorld FriendFeed room (oow), but I've taken the streams of many members of that room and added them to my "Professional" list in beta FriendFeed/fftogo. The latter action especially will give me a good view of what's going on during Oracle OpenWorld 2008.

Now that is only one way to have online interaction with Oracle OpenWorld 2008.

• There's obviously also mix.oracle.com, which if I recall correctly was just beginning to emerge last November. There is an Oracle OpenWorld 2008 group on Mix with over 500 members.


• There is also a Flickr group.


• And there are probably a bunch of groups that I haven't heard of yet. (IRC channel???????)


• And there are some official ways to interact, such as the @otnatopenworld Twitter account.


• Keep an eye on the OTN Tech Blog, the Oracle AppsLab blog, and (unofficially) Eddie Awad's blog for updates as Oracle OpenWorld 2008 draws closer.

But perhaps I should revisit my earlier statements. Is Twitter passe? Perhaps it's been passe for me, but it's likely that there will be a LOT more people using Twitter at Oracle OpenWorld 2008 than there were at Oracle OpenWorld 2007. And if that means that most of the conversation will be taken place on Twitter, then...I guess we'll all end up on Twitter. Plea to those on Twitter; please use the #openworld08 hashtag for your tweets, so that they can be found by search.twitter.com and similar services.

And it's good I checked that. Look at this:

Tags: oow08 (for Twitter only), openworld08 (elsewhere)
Follow via Twitter: @otnatopenworld

So it looks like for 2008, Twitter users will use a shorter hashtag to overcome Twitter's 140 character limitation. So just to be safe, should I use both #oow08 and #openworld08 in my tweets, or will that merely confuse matters? The mind reels...

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