I was presenting at a teleconference earlier this week for OneWorld. It’s a great organisation, and all my fellow teleconferencers were from non-profits, so I felt like there was a sympathetic audience on the other end of the line for my presentation of highlights from NTEN’s Non-Profit Technology Conference.

But really, I had no clue whether they were sympathetic or not.

As I was presenting, everyone else’s line was muted, so my words went completely, disturbingly uninterrupted. Not even a hushed cough or a shifting of buttocks on a chair to be heard. And, of course, there was no visual feedback. Were these quiet folk nodding? Sneering? Snoring? Cheering me on? Or wishing I’d finish? Were they, indeed, quiet at all? There was no way to tell.

Teleconferencing is a silent, squirming ordeal for presenters.  It’s not quite so bad when everyone’s an active participant, or there’s an accompanying web-based component, or some other way to provide interaction. But for a straightforward talk, it’s downright nasty.

The best part of making any presentation is feeling the mood of the audience and responding to that mood. You can start off flat and still win them over if you use the visual cues, eye contact, subtle shifting of attention to help you remould your talk to fit the room. Fat chance of that when you’re speaking in the teleconferencing cone of silence.

Web 3.0: Goodbye teleconferences? 

After my bit was over in the teleconference, the host invited questions. I’d been talking about web 2.0 sites and services and someone asked: “What do you think Web 3.0 will bring us?”

There are lots of different ideas about this. Tim Berners-Lee thinks web 3.0 will bring us the semantic web, an Internet in which computers understand the information stored on them and act as truly intelligent agents. Self-aware sites, if you will. Others talk about an intersection of small applications all working together, regardless of whether they’re on your computer, a phone or another device. Something far more sophisticated and seamless than the digital handshaking that goes on now with web 2.0 apps and services. Others think the driving technology behind web 3.0 will be improved hardware and greater bandwidth, and applications which benefit from these hardware advances.

Perhaps it was in response to the eerie quiet in which I had just presented, but I picked on the latter; the hardware-driven advances. I said web 3.0 would be the death of the teleconference. After all, there’s no reason why, with the faster connections and more powerful graphics processing coming down the pipeline, videoconferencing shouldn’t replace teleconferencing almost entirely - at least in countries with big, fat Internet pipes and generous data plans, like the US. If I can conference on Skype with my far-flung family now, then surely web 3.0 will deliver ubitquitous video interactions.

Of course, web 3.0 should herald much more than merely the death of teleconferencing. Seth Godin has an interesting take on web 4.0 and it sounds good to me. But only if I no longer have to teleconference. Without that advance, web 3 or web 4 will both be failures.

Quite a day today: Mixed it with 650 other women online at the Women Who Tech (WWT) telesummit and my new Apple MacBook Pro arrived.

The telesummit was excellent. Sessions were held using ReadyTalk, with slideshows online and a free phone-in number. There were some glitches with the web side, mostly due to misunderstandings and broken links. I found the ReadyTalk support people very helpful in response, and the WWT women were equally helpful and flexible. There’s room for improvement in helping newcomers understand how a combined phone-in/webinar works, but hundreds of women managed to participate very happily.

I noticed some overlap in sessions from last week’s NTEN Non-Profit Technology Conference. That overlap wasn’t necessarily a disadvantage: I found it useful to have some concepts and material repeated with the slightly different slant required by a webinar. The 75-minute sessions zipped past at an amazing rate and were stuffed with good information and useful resources. I attended sessions on Get Your Local Campaigns On; Build an Online Campaign; Women and Social Capital; Firing up your Online List; Everything you Wanted to Know about Tech But Were Afraid to Ask; and Web 2.0 sessions. I used Twitter to tweet all the sessions I attended, while following those I couldn’t attend via others’ tweets. Very effective but definitely a multitasking stretch, what with several other background tasks requiring my attention.

A few highlights: Beth Kanter’s Cute Dog Theory of Web 2.0; listening to the panel field all sorts of questions in the Everything You Wanted to Know session; hearing some of the personal tales behind the highly successful ventures of some very high profile women.

Women Who Tech will be publishing the sessions online for those who couldn’t attend, so keep an eye on their site. And keep an ear out for the next time around: it’s a high-value, high-intensity day.

Crossing over 

In fact, so high-intensity was it that I didn’t get a chance to open the box containing my brand new Mac. It’s sitting here, beckoning. I plan to leave it under wraps until tomorrow, when I can do it justice. As this will be the first Mac I’ve spent time with for well over 15 years, I plan to blog the experience.

The abundance of very happy Mac users at the NTEN conference and the ability to run Windows on the new Macs has lured me into this new realm. While I’m not planning to plunge into the ranks of the blinded-by-the-Mac fanatics, I think Microsoft is becoming more of a lumbering behemoth with each passing year and it’s time to look at alternatives. I intend to load up the release version of Ubuntu 8.04 when it’s launched in 24 days, so it should be an interesting time.

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.