How are we using Twitter? Thursday, June 11 11:07 PM

Just a quick thought regarding how we use Twitter . . . This afternoon, I was observing the opening plenary session of the NMC 2009 Summer Conference (#nmc2009) which was being live video streamed and tweeted. As I watched the twitter stream, I realized that even after several comments or questions posed to the group *all* of the tweets were unidirectional; they were simple broadcasts of what was being said by the presenter. There were a few tweets with commentary, but they were also individual comments with no real discussion.

My question is this.... If we're talking about a group of people - both locally and remotely - that can all see and hear the presentation, how much value is there to broadcast tweets that simply report what's being said? Are we used to blogging followed by asynchronous comments to the extent that when presented with an opportunity for synchronous backchannel conversation when we're all sharing the same experience we miss that opportunity? Should there not be more to "liveblogging" than just rebroadcasting the presenter's comments? Is there not an opportunity to have a conversation we were not able to have previously - a backchannel kibbutz concurrent with the presenter's comments? Or, is the lack of commentary attributable to something as simple as it being earlier in the day (as @dwtno noted)? There's two pages of screen shots below. Take a look and comment. I can upload additional pages if interested; the broadcat tweets continued for four screens plus.