Very very very regretably canceling my trip to Chicago for BlogHer this week. I have been a fan of BlogHer for years, and was thrilled last year when I finally got to attend. I had been asked to join some amazing women in tech on a great panel I’ve looked forward to it for months.

Unfortunately, I’ve just gotten back home from roughly 3 months in San Francisco working on my startup oneforty. I am emotionally and physically tapped out and not bouncing back from the redeye I took with my 2 and (newly) 4 year olds Saturday. Meanwhile the long days of being a startup founder (oh and, um, single mom) and stuff around the recent launch of Twitter for Dummies, is taking all my energy. I’m overblessed with very exciting but high-pressure opportunities. I also need to catch up with my daughters who got the short end of the stick during all the time I spent in SF raising oneforty’s angel round and working with Pivotal Labs to build oneforty.com.

So this weekend I am laying low, dropping off the grid and quietly/sadly missing a PHENOMENAL gathering of women in Chicago. I very much regret letting the organizers down and missing time with so many of my heroes among women online. Speaking of which, THANK YOU Cathy Brooks (@cathybrooks) for agreeing to cover my absence on the Advanced Social Media, Syndication and Stats panel at 10:45 on Saturday.

(By the way, I do have a room booked for Thursday-Sunday at the conference hotel, and would love to be able to turn that over to another attendee or attendees looking for lodgings last minute.)

I was truly looking forward to seeing SO many great people in the Windy City, and I’m sorry to miss it. Elisa, Jory and Lisa, I am a HUGE fan of BlogHer, know this year’s 5th anniversary sold-out program will be amazing, and wish I could live up to my commitment to be part of it. I very much appreciate your generous-hearted understanding of the situation.

Warmly,

Laura

This is a guest post written by Wilfried Schobeiri.

Anyone watching Twitter trends over the last few days would have noticed the hashtag #CNNFail up there toward the top. Why? Because CNN and other major news media failed to pick up and report on the severity of the turmoil surrounding the Iranian elections. In the mean time, Twitter’s #IranElection, Tehran, Mousavi, Ahmadinejad trends were fire hoses of real-time information, videos, and pictures.

I should disclose this immediately: I was skeptical about Twitter. I had many doubts about its viability as a social/news medium. Too simple. Too small. Too saturated with banalities. Status updates? “What’s the point when you have Facebook?” I asked. But over time, the value of the connections and content streams Twitter facilitated was made clear to me. So I shrugged it off. And then of course there’s the ridiculous valuation. $500 million? $1.7 billion? “They’re not even profitable!” I said. But that’s what the 21st century is all about, isn’t it? Putting price tags on things that are traditionally priceless (cue Master Card commercial). So I shrugged it off too.

But now there’s something else going on, something more substantial and mind blowing than anything else I’ve witnessed here: Twitter is actually facilitating what may soon be labeled a revolutionary movement in Iran. Let that sink in. The revolution will be Twittered.

An enormous community has emerged, spanning the globe. Through the turmoil, students and the IT crowd across Iran have been able to spread news of events. Images and video have proliferated, giving us glimpses of the very real tension currently walking the streets of Tehran. What was likely intended to be a quiet, strictly controlled suppression of events by the present rulers ended up turning into what history will likely judge as a PR nightmare for Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, despite disrupted communications. What’s more is that insiders across Iran have used Twitter to coordinate protests and warn of danger, all while cell and SMS services have been shut down. Meanwhile, major news media was focused on reporting about BET and other infotainment. Thanks to Twitter, the mismatch in facts and positioning in the official responses vs. this breed of citizen reporting has become extremely clear. Thanks to Twitter, the post-election events have flourished with attention. Thanks to Twitter, those of us sitting at our computers half a world away feel closer to the Iranian people and their world.

Of course, the old guard deserves some credit here as well. The slow bleed of traditional media, shuttering of foreign bureaus, and rise of citizen journalism and social media have enabled Twitter to fill the void left by investigative journalism. The average person can now report news across the world, in real time, without sponsorship, time and costs of plane tickets, media visas, and years of familiarization required to accurately cover a region.

Because of the role technology has played, it’s hard for me to liken these events as similar to the elections past. And that’s why I’m now 100% sold on the real value of Twitter.

(In the meantime, CNN has adjusted their coverage. They are now engaging the viewer by reading directly off a Twitter feed displayed on television.)

Wilfried Schobeiri is an Iranian-American software architect and entrepreneur. He has been following the Iranian Elections out of concern for family and welfare of the region. He is passionate about working with startups to create compelling software. He blogs at http://nphase.org.

This is a guest post written by Olivia Mitchell and has been reprinted from Speaking About Presenting with permission.

Twitter is now a reality at many conferences. Now the question is: should you display a live Twitter stream on a large screen so that everyone (not just the tweeters) in the audience can see it?

Sir Ken Robinson speaking at “Hacking Education” organised by Union Square Ventures. Photo used on the Speaking About Presenting blog with permission from Fred Wilson

Having Twitter on a large screen can enrich the conference experience. Here’s a report from the Museums and the Web conference 09:

So when the conference delegates arrived at the auditorium for the conference welcome and opening talk we found two computer displays: one of the speaker’s slides and the other a display of Twitter posts tagged with the #mw2009 tag, using the Twitterfall software, And judging by comments made on the conference blog, many people found that this live display of tweets in the opening session provided a valuable way of developing a shared sense of community and active participation which continued throughout the conference, with many newcomers subscribing to Twitter, following the more well-established Twitter users and engaging with the discussions themselves.

Twitter can also allow the conversation to continue after the conference. At the Travolution Summit 2009 , 200 of the 1,150 tweets using the #travsummit hashtag were after the event. The organiser, Kevin May, comments:

Now this is where it gets interesting. Post-event analysis and continuing the conversation was, until now, the Holy Grail of event organisers.

However, there is a downside. Distraction:

Museums and the Web conference 09

Which is not to say that everyone found the Twitterfall display useful: some participants, for example, did find the display distracting.

Richard Mulholland at NetProphet 09

…looking around the room, more people are watching the twitter screen than are listening to Arthur’s great preso.

But you can get the benefits of conference tweeting without the distraction by choosing carefully when to display the twitter stream on a large screen. The decision depends on the nature of each session: is it a presentation, panel or a discussion? Let’s look at each in turn.

Live twitter screen during a presentation

My advice is to only show the twitter stream when it adds to the presentation- just like any visual. With an actively tweeting audience, a twitter stream can move extremely fast. It will be very hard for the audience not to pay attention to the constantly moving screen – so it’s likely to be distracting. If it’s on the large screen it’s no longer an opt-in experience.

However, I think that Twitter can be a great audience participation tool. And it will be much more inclusive if you do display the Twitter stream, so that non-tweeters can see it too. So have the Twitter display ready to go (use the remote of the datashow projecter to hide the screen) and turn it on just when you want it. That could be when:

• you ask for audience input on a particular point
• you ask the audience for questions
• you take “twitter breaks” specifically to look at the twitter stream and address any issues which have been raised.

For more ideas on this see my posts 8 things I learnt about using Twitter as a participation tool and 7 ways to use Twitter to engage your audience.

Live twitter stream during a panel

Twittering during a panel allows the audience to have direct input into the questions being asked of the panel. It allows the tweeters in the audience to mould the experience in a way that otherwise would not be possible. This can take place without the twitter stream being displayed – but that excludes those not on Twitter. Having the twitter stream displayed also allows panelists to refer visually to specific tweets as they respond to them. Mike McAllen (@mmcallen) reported back from Blogworld 08:

In one of the panels I attended they had the breakout screen projecting a Twitter search feed (http://search.twitter.com) To make it work the moderator made up a conference room tag #PR08 and the people sitting in the audience had a running dialogue with what the presenters were talking about. This dialogue was between audience members, and of course anyone else who wanted to see what was going on anywhere in the world (with an internet connection)

So the audience was real time commenting and asking and forming the best questions together for the panel. It was fascinating. I find panel discussions usually frustrating because each panelist is usually fighting for time to speak or someone drones on and on. This way the audience is the real moderator.

Live twitter stream during a discussion

This is where Twitter really comes into it’s own – allowing more than one person to have a voice at the same time: Fred Wilson describes his experience:

It is hard to moderate a conversation of 40 people and there are times when several people want to make a point but one gets the opportunity. I started to notice that the others would simply post their thought to twitter instead which allowed the rest of the room to see what they wanted to say in parallel with the point that was being made live.

Downsides of displaying Twitter

There are some other downsides of displaying Twitter on a large screen:

1. Spammers and trolls may be attracted by the attention they can get

And once the tag was included in the top tags of the day it, perhaps inevitably, attracted the attention of Twitter spammers, with a tweet from ‘PantyGirl’ – and an associated image being included in the live Twitterfall display. [from Brian Kelly at the Museums and the Web conference 09]

Tweetchat allows you to block users if this becomes a problem.

2. Negative comments about the speaker or panelists

Most reports seem to be that people are courteous about what they tweet if they know it’s going to be displayed on a large screen. But there’s still a risk of this happening – and it’s something to accept.

3. Off-topic tweets

From Kevin May of the Travolution Summit

If the on-stage content started to wane, people would Tweet *other* observations, such as comments regarding the panel’s socks and footwear!

From the comments on Kevin’s post, it seems most people enjoyed a little light humor.

4. Libelous tweets

I haven’t found any reports of this happening, but it’s a risk to be aware of. This would be the one situation where it would be wise to pull the stream from the display.

Your views

What do you think? When would Twitter on the large screen add or detract from your conference experience?

Olivia Mitchell blogs at Speaking about Presenting. Visit her blog for more presentation tips.

Just a brief salute to mark Ada Lovelace Day. I know hundreds of admirable, inspiring women in technology. Frankly I’m amazed when conference organizers and others complain about a “lack” of women in technology to serve as executives, authors, speakers and entrepreneurs. That’s just a pretty lazy cop-out. There are plenty of women who inspire me every day and set amazing examples for the world through their intelligence, integrity and leadership.

Selecting one is almost impossible, so I’ll fall back on the woman whose tech leadership in the web’s early days first caught my attention: Esther Dyson. Reading about her in the pages of Wired in the late 90′s, her name and intelligence and leadership stuck with me like nobody else’s. I was gushy (and as a result, tongue-tied) when I got to shake her hand at TechSet NYC last year (thanks Stephanie and Brian!). I continue to look up to her, and am grateful for her example. Thanks Esther.

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It’s World Water Day. Leaving 1 in 6 humans without safe drinking water is a time bomb. Letting thousands of children under 5 die every day is a time bomb. Share this video, get involved with Charity: Water, and make a difference.

With love,
Pistachio

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So you’re home (or you got to stay for SXSW music in which case I hate you. you’re not really reading blogs anyhow) from SXSWi, missing your friends and recovering from 5 days of (pick all that apply) hangovers, sleep deprivation, inbox neglect, slipped deadlines. What’s a geek to do? Don’t drown yourself in the Twitterstream. Try these creative (hastily scribbled, I’m busy working on my own #1, below) cures…

10. Grab a 6-pack, jump into your neighbor’s RV, sing loudly and off-key and add #RVIP to your next tweet

9. Put a chainlink fence in front of the office bathrooms and tell co-workers “sorry, VIP only.”

8. Find a rooftop bar, serve Caipirinhas, invite friends and call it #GeeksLove[activity name here]

7. BBQ and Shiner Bock. ‘Nuff said

6. Blog the 5 most valuable things you got out of SXSWi and dig deeper with links to more information, then compare with what your friends learned, and keep the energy going

5. Continue trying to figure out where the people you’d hoped to meet are hanging out by stalking following their Tweets and FourSquare streams.

4. Watch online videos of TED Talks, past SXSWi and best-of videos from SXSWi presenters like Kathy Sierra, Merlin Mann, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Hsieh…

3. …and “live-tweet” them

2. Move to SF

But what’s the single BEST way to cure your SXSWi homesickness?

1. Rock out your new project so you can bring the Thunder at SXSWi 2010!!

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UPDATE: The campaign kicks off at the Mashable party tonight, 10 PM central

Twice I’ve spent a week at Children’s Hospital in Boston, once each with my daughters “S” and “Z.” Both times I had the healthiest kid in the joint, and both times I was truly humbled and inspired by the heroic children and families who spend much too much time there.

I was humbled to see guys my age on the elevator discussing their kids’ blood counts as “normally” as sports scores. How do you normalize life when your kid lives in a hospital? Where do you find strength to battle their serious and chronic illness? How can you give your baby joy and respite from their battle?

So I’m on Team Petty in the in the SXSW Charity Smackdown. Please join me! Please tweet, blog, donate and tell your friends that we’re fighting to give seriously sick kids a chance to go to Victory Junction (modeled on Paul Newman’s Hole-in-the-Wall-gang camps.)

NASCAR fans need no introduction to Kyle Petty, a popular 3rd-generation race car driver. In 2000, Kyle had to bury his son Adam after a tragic accident at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

Adam’s dream had been to build a camp for seriously ill children in North Carolina. So just five months after his untimely death his family met with Paul Newman to establish Victory Junction in Adam’s memory. The first camp opened in Randleman, NC in 2004, and a second camp in Wyandotte County, Kansas is coming.

At Victory Junction, children 6-16 battling serious disease get a small break in their fight. They get to go to camp for free and just be a kid for a little while. Kids that would otherwise never be able to have a normal fun summer experience. Kids who bear some pretty heavy burdens.

Join me in battle alongside Kyle and Rutledge Wood of the SPEED Channel. Help us give courageous kids and their families a few moments away from their own fights. Grab a badge, make a donation, tweet, blog, just please, spread the word.

Please tweet:

Charity Smackdown! Kyle Petty and @pistachio are fighting for sick kids and Victory Junction. http://bit.ly/Jthqi Please RT? http://bit.ly/VictJ (or just click here to tweet it)

Social media pals Pete Cashmore, Chris Brogan and many others, I DO love you guys… but THIS is a SmackDown.

Thanks!

Warmly, Pistachio

Presentation expert Olivia Mitchell has written a follow-up article on her previous post that was published to the Touchbase blog.

She notes that there are a ton of comments below with some great points not covered in the original post, How to Present When People are Tweeting. So that you don’t have to wade through them all, Olivia Mitchell has summarized the comment threads in a post on her blog Is Twitter a good thing while you’re presenting?”

To recall her key points on “How to Present when People are Tweeting,” Mitchell writes about the following benefits:

• Tweeting while presenting helps the audience focus on the subject matter currently being discussed.
• It also gives the audience members more content.
• The immediacy and speed of Twitter enables audience members to get questions answered quickly.
• You can gain from the presentation even if you weren’t physically at the event.

Of course, there’s more — so hop on over to the original post if you missed it and then to Olivia’s follow-up on her blog to see the subsequent discussion. Olivia has also recently presented at an event and shared her thoughts.

Olivia Mitchell blogs at Speaking about Presenting. Visit her blog for more presentation tips.

I’m long overdue announcing some of this, so I’ll roll it all out at once…

(and then jam over to @bostontwestival, organized by @justinmwhitaker and part of @Amanda Rose’s PHENOMENAL global Twestival movement. (Check it out NOW!) 20,000 Twitterers are gathering over a 24 hour period around the globe. The aim? raise $1 MILLION for Charity: Water, my absolute favorite charity)

Todd Defren and I are excited to officially announce* that SHIFT Communications is hosting Pistachio Consulting as a “specialist in residence.” In return for sharing space (and inspiration) in their beautiful offices in the New Balance building in Brighton, I’m working with their executives and teams on what Twitter can do for SHIFT’s clients. Since a majority of SHIFT-ers already Twitter, it’s awesome to dive right into sophisticated and strategic ideas that can rock out what they do for their clients.

We’ll do a few structured sessions that dig deep into Twitter’s utility for PR (yes, we’ll offer these to the public later on in our upcoming webinar series), as well as informal brainstorming sessions and lunch-and-learns.

(*Todd is very silly to use the “Q” word in his post. I blame Brian, Tara and a dollar store sash she gave me. Plus the fact I’m not nearly funny enough to score “Court Jester.”)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, lots going on:

• Welcome, new Pistachio client Johnson & Johnson

Image via Wikipedia

• I’ll guest lecture at Harvard Business School this spring on Twitter for business. Prof. Andrew McAfee‘s students will work with Twitter and enterprise microsharing tools throughout the semester, then lob tomatoes at me give me a rigorous grilling about the business applications and cases we’re seeing. I’m also speaking at the ICA April 4th in a special AIGA program around the Shepard Fairey exhibit.

• Monitor Talent signed me to their roster in December. Contact Mel Blake for high-energy, high-level briefings on Twitter’s business significance. It was completely humbling to meet folks like Dan Ariely, Dan Gillmor, Ethan Zuckerman and dozens more at their Access to Minds event.
  

• Mainstream media attention to the business use of Twitter is at an all-time high. Just my own personal recent clips alone include CIO Magazine, MassHighTech, Entrepreneur Magazine, US News & World Report, NECN, NPR, and CNET.com. Look for Forbes, WSJ and the GQ (UK) soon, too.

• TipJoy We had such a great time collaborating on the @WellWishes campaign (thanks all — YOU raised $25,000 and a whole lot of awareness for Charity: Water!) that Ivan and Abby Kirgin invited me to become an official advisor to TipJoy alongside Chris Sacca. I’d been looking for Twitter to get its own payments system for a long time, and have very high expectations for TipJoy.

• Society for New Communications Research included me in their 2009 Fellows lineup, along with Pistachio collaborator and Fast Company blogger Marcia Conner. Congrats to all the new Fellows, it’s amazing company to be in.

• TouchBase Blog and LinkBlog — Articles, ideas, case studies and links to what businesses need to know about Twitter and microsharing. Don’t have time to scour the social web for that latest information or sort through piles of Twitter news to discern what businesses need to know? We’re your one-stop-shop. Follow @touchbase to find out when we post or add valuable bookmarks to our TouchBase Link Blog (Delicious account). Tamar Weinberg holds house and home together on all of the above as our Editor in Chief alongside more than 25 AWESOME contributors and guest bloggers.

• Twitter for Dummies (old news, but never formally announced) We are writing Twitter for Dummies. I’m thrilled to be working with Michael Gruen (who is also on Pistachio’s advisory board) and Leslie Poston. The book is due out in July, and there’s a even a brainstorming community where you can add your ideas. Also follow @dummies on Twitter for updates when we have them.

We have some great stuff coming up – things that will add business value really cost-effectively, including webinars, hands-on trainings and seminars (starting in NYC) and a new series of white papers and eBooks on the business use of Twitter, enterprise microsharing and more. Also, look for us to (finally) post a team page soon to let you meet the people working hard behind the scenes over here. Speaking of “behind the scenes,” I hope to have even bigger news soon…

Please stay tuned!

Warmly, Pistachio

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My “media economy” Twitter rant before patchy SMS delivery:

Though advertising’s effectiveness and “ROI” was always massively less measurable than social media’s it enjoys incumbent advantage/inertia

The whole economic basis of media has been advertising and television. Entities that alternately make us insecure and pacify/numb us.

Can media now find a new engine that is, just as our society needs right now, driven by individuals becoming confident and engaged?

How sustainable could an economy driven by passiveness/insecurity be? Really? What end was it ever driving 2 other than debt overextension?

Just sayin.

I’ll add more commentary, context & links later on, but for now, just setting the sequence straight.

Responding to various comments I added these tweets later on…

Fascinating to look at replies to my (totally desequenced and garbled) media economy rant and see what else you penciled in

Replies reference “government handouts” and “organized media” and other concepts my rant didn’t include.

I’ll blog it later on. I *am* calling out that we need new economic models for new decentralized media and its ties to the broader economy.
@MProfsCEO I believe the new models are still commercially/free market based, but FACILITATIVE. “Helping people buy” not helping co’s sell

@mprofsceo forerunners of them = amazon’s ratings + recommendations, @garyvee’s entire business, social shopping + some affiliate programs

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