Making Live-Tweeting Easier with Noter Live

Conference season is upon us, with both the MLA and the AHA (among others) coming up this weekend.

Profhacker has a long list of posts about live-tweeting conference panels:

• Brian’s Ten Tips for Tweeting at Conferences
• Natalie on making the most of your academic conference experience, which includes using social media
• Adeline exploring Best-Practices for Live-Tweeting at Conferences.

One of the challenges I’ve had in live-tweeting is keeping track of the hashtag, as well as the speakers’ twitter handles. Enter Noter Live:

Created by Kevin Marks, Noter Live provides a simple web-based tool that allows you to save and switch between speakers, as well as hashtags. It also saves the tweets in a kind of notepad. It’s free and open source, and I like the simple and clean interface. It could be seen as both a strength and a weakness that you don’t get a feed from the hashtag; a strength because the space remains uncluttered, but a weakness because you can’t see potential responses or conversations taking place.

Then again, I usually have about four different Twitter clients open when I’m live-tweeting, so it wouldn’t be that much of a problem.

I’ve always appreciated those who live-tweeted conferences because for years, it was the only way I could participate, and this year is no exception; I’m not able to attend the MLA this year, so I’m hoping people will use Noter Live (or just plain old Twitter) to bring the conference to a larger audience.

What strategies or tools do you use to live-tweet?

[Creative Commons licensed image from flickr user Alan Levine]