I’ve just emerged from my first NTEN (Non-Profit Technology Network) Conference, conveniently held here in New Orleans. It was intense, useful and entertaining.

Having attended many vendor-run techie conferences in the past, the NTEN Conference came as a refreshing surprise. This was not just a bunch of geeks, it was a bunch of geeks dedicated to making the world better, and that difference showed in major ways. Instead of sitting down at lunch tables where people focus intently on their food, avoid eye contact and grunt in fright if addressed directly (my experience of most Microsoft Technet conferences), people at NTC sat down with strangers and engaged. There was a high degree of bilingual fluency (techtalk and plain English) and a strong sense of people wishing you well in your own endeavours. That all contributed to an extremely high level of sharing.

As you’d expect from a crowd with such a strong geek quotiant, the backchannel conversation flowed as intensely as the face-to-face communication. Twitter was used as the official backchannel and it worked brilliantly, even if there were some hiccoughs with a few technical details. With more than a quarter of the conference participants using Twitter, there was a constant flow of real-time session reports, conference updates and social organising. By joining in the Twitter flow before the conference began, I arrived on the first day already feeling like I knew at least a half a dozen participants and that made it much easier to feel at home in the 1100+ throng. I tweeted from my laptop during my sessions, and followed along as others were tweeting from concurrent sessions. For quick Twitter updates on the go, I’d switch on my Kindle for reading the tweet stream or use my phone to send tweets. I also gave Twirl a whirl. It’s a desktop application, built on the Adobe Air platform, that provides an easy way to keep track of tweets from those you follow, via a pop-up window. It works on Windows and the Mac.

I love how Twitter works in multiple ways: via a browser, on the phone, through instant messaging, on the desktop. I also love how it ties into other services so beautifully.

One such service is Jott. Jott’s a transcription service - you phone up Jott and leave a message, Jott transcribes your message into text and delivers it as an email or as an SMS (phone text message), or adds it to a list. So, when someone mentions a great book you should read or a site worth visiting, you phone up, leave yourself a message, and it’ll be there in your email or on your web-based Jott account when you get home.

Like the good Web 2.0 app it is, Jott plays nicely with other services, including Twitter. Once you add your Twitter account to your Jott links, you can phone Jott, tell it you want to send a message to Twitter, speak your message and wait for Jott to reply “Got it!” and you’re done. It’s much faster and easier than texting from your phone.

You can also use Jott to take down notes from your browser. That’s how I used it at NTC: I created a Jott list for each session I attended, then typed notes into the list. With Twitter open in a separate Firefox tab, I could tweet and record a session at the same time.

So far, Jott’s only available in the US and Canada. I hope to see that change - this is one of those must-have apps.

I’ve been resisting Twitter because I thought the signal-to-noise ratio might be so bad it’d be unbearable. But with the NTEN (Non-profit Technical Network) conference about to take off in New Orleans next week and many NTENers planning to use Twitter as a backchannel for the conference, I decided I better get on board. Of course, now I’ve been completely seduced.

The seduction started almost immediately. I decided to follow one of the NTEN conference participants and immediately discovered a bunch of little gems in her tweets. Links to interesting sites; a new and interesting beta program just opening up; some news about another conference I couldn’t attend. Within minutes of starting to use it, Twitter had already paid off. It’d be incredibly easy to be swamped by Twitter, but a little discernment in who you follow makes all the difference.

I’ve been wondering how I’ll use Twitter at the conference. I’ll be lugging my laptop with me and I’ll have my cell phone, and Twitter is accessible using either of them. But I’ll need to ration my laptop use to preserve my battery (a conference with 1000 techheads in attendance - just imagine the competition for power outlets!) and I prefer not to receive tweets via SMS. So it dawned on me that I have another alternative: my Kindle. It’s comfortably portable, not very power hungry even with the wireless switched on, has a web browser built in and a keyboard for sending Twitter updates.

I’m not a great fan of the Kindle’s web browser, but that’s probably because I am yet to be convinced of the appeal of viewing any web site on a tiny screen. Still, one of the great virtues of Twitter is the tweets are short - 140 characters and that’s it. And there’s a Twitter mobile site, m.twitter.com, which winnows away all the excess fluff from the normal Twitter site and leaves you with a clean list of tweets and links. That seems like an ideal sort of site for Kindle-based viewing.

So I loaded up Kindle’s browser (you get to it by clicking Menu in the Home screen and then selecting Experimental -> Basic Web) and typed in m.twitter.com. After logging in - probably the hardest part of the whole deal - there was a lovely, clean list of my tweets and the tweets of people I’m following. I added my home page to the Kindle bookmarks, a bookmark for the “People You Follow” page, and jumped over to the NTEN conference group (08ntc) and bookmarked that, too. Then I sent a tweet using the keyboard - quick and sweet.

Accessing links on the Kindle entails scrolling to the text containing the links and clicking - you’re then offered a list of all the links in that piece of text and you can scroll and click the one you need. It’s a little clunky, but quick enough to use, especially with Twitter’s condensed style. In fact, Twitter is probably one of the best fits for Kindle’s dumbed-down browser.

So I’ll head off to the NTEN conference next week with the Kindle in hand. I’ll report back on the experience. By the way, you can find me here on Twitter.