Twitter reaction to my #TAM2012 speech

August 1, 2012 by 16 Comments

I’ve gotten a fantastic reaction to my presentations at The Amazing Meeting 2012 (TAM2012) this year. Part of that reaction took place on Twitter during my talks and in the weeks since.

Twitter has a notoriously short memory, its search only goes a few days back. So comments on a live event can slip into Twitter’s memory hole alarmingly quickly. They’re actually all still there, but just inaccessible unless you know the URLs.

So I thought I would capture the live comments on my TAM2012 Plenary talk: You are the Future of Skepticism on the Internet. They give you an idea of what live-tweeting on a speech is like, and show what the initial reaction to the talk was.

I’ve included both positive and negative comments, as many as I could find.  These are presented in mostly chronological order, though I’ve reordered a few comments when it helps to follow the flow of conversation. And as you’ll see, I pulled out one sub-conversation so it can be read on its own.

 

Live Tweeting and Initial Reaction



 

Poll Bombing Strikes a Nerve

Near the middle of my talk I mention poll crashing (or as some call it, freeping). You can see Kyle VanderBeek, Sharon Hill and Hayley Stevens agree with my comments above. Their tweets caught the attention of a prominent blogger, who despite not being present managed to get angry enough to continue tweeting about this one point in my 30 minute talk for the next hour and 19 minutes (about 20 total tweets). Here is what he said:


 

A Dose of Humor

A few other folks found the above to be a bit over the top, and responded humorously:

 

Comments on the Full Script

After I had time to decompress from TAM, and reformat a few photos and the like from my slides, I posted the script to my talk here on the blog. The positive reaction continued:

I’m still waiting for the blogger who didn’t like my take on poll bombing to read the full script and comment on what I actually said, rather than what he thought I said.

In any case, if you’ve never had the chance to follow along with a live event via Twitter, that gives you a taste of what “live tweeting” is like.

Thanks also to @postielinley and Tana Owens who also made nice comments. I couldn’t include your comments here because your timelines are protected. But know they were appreciated.

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Filed under Skeptic Events, Social Media Tagged with , ,

About Tim Farley
Software engineer, computer security expert and scientific skeptic who created the site What's The Harm, Tim Farley is also a Research Fellow for electronic media for the James Randi Educational Foundation.

16 Responses to Twitter reaction to my #TAM2012 speech

  1. sgerbic says:
    August 1, 2012 at 11:45 am

    Thanks Tim, (seems I’m forever saying that)

    Wanted to point out that Ross Blocher (from Oh No Ross and Carrie podcast and the IIG) was the JREF person doing that awesome tweet job during your speech.

    • Tim Farley says:
      August 1, 2012 at 12:25 pm

      Oh, thanks! I meant to look up who the guest JREF tweeter was and dropped the ball. It was quite a bit of work finding all the permalinks to these tweets and getting them in an order that was readable.

      Thanks, Ross!

    • aegist says:
      August 1, 2012 at 12:57 pm

      “Thanks Tim, (seems I’m forever saying that)”

      Hahaha. That sounds familiar. :)

      FWIW, daily rbutr usage (rebuttals added) has increased by about 10x since TAM2012.

  2. sgerbic says:
    August 1, 2012 at 11:46 am

    I also got a few new people to follow on twitter from this post.

    • Tim Farley says:
      August 1, 2012 at 12:26 pm

      Excellent! That was why I took the trouble to make all the tweets “live” and not just static screen shots.

      • idoubtit says:
        August 1, 2012 at 12:39 pm

        Can you tip us off on the Tweet retrieval tool you used. Is the tweet display a wordpress plugin? What happens if the above linked tweets are deleted?

      • Tim Farley says:
        August 1, 2012 at 2:00 pm

        Yes, the embedded tweets are a standard feature that they include at WordPress.com. I think this is the plugin for Twitter embeds for standalone WordPress installs..

        To retrieve I used several tools. I used the Epilogger archive of the #TAM2012 hashtag to find the bones of the discussion. I augmented that with all the stuff out of my own mentions column. I chased a few replies and retweets back to the originals, and went back through particular Twitter user’s feeds (such as JREF) to pick up stragglers.

        I think the tweets stick around even if deleted, but I’m willing to bet that if I subsequently edited the post after a Tweet was deleted, it would break it. (You simply paste the URL into the post, so when you save it has to fetch the tweet contents to render it).

  3. idoubtit says:
    August 1, 2012 at 12:36 pm

    What a great example of using actual data to support your purpose.

    This must have taken a lot of time and work to do. I appreciate a thorough and careful post. This was a great read-through of the reaction to a well-prepared talk. And thanks for reminding me why I stopped reading PZ two years back.

  4. Marc David Barnhill says:
    August 1, 2012 at 12:41 pm

    Tim, this is such a revealing look at how these kinds of discussions play out in real time, and such a rich opportunity for reflection on how we use social media both to amplify and to distort statements and ideas. Very nice job putting this together, and fabulous talk to begin with.

  5. Natalie Jaran (@KKochanski) says:
    August 1, 2012 at 7:32 pm

    Tim, your presentation was excellent as all your presentations are. This one was most inspiring and I know I took what you said to heart. WoT has been on my computer for a while and I intend to make more use of it now.

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  7. LarianLeQuella (@LarianLeQuella) says:
    August 2, 2012 at 7:14 pm

    Thanks Tim! It was a pleasure to meet you at TAM, and hope to meet you much more in the future. Keep up the great work.

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