The powerful tool of social media was clearly demonstrated in this year's SfN conference.
The sciple and neuroflocks team is made up of 6 members, 4 of which stay home (Toronto, Canada) while only 2 members attended the meeting.
Daily summaries presented either as network analysis, ranking the number of tweets or by highlighting the hot topic(s) of the day were all done by absent neuroflock members relying on #sfn11 tweets of conference attendees.
When the sciple.org team brainstormed on how they could use the keyword and network analysis tools they had no idea just how useful the neuroflocks site would be for tracking and analyzing tweets collected prior and during the conference. The number of tweets skyrocketed with each conference day (the highest peak was on Nov14).
Reading tweets on the Neuroflocks page was extremely useful as you can be in another session and still know what is going on in for example, Robert Shiller's "How Human Behavior drives the economy" talk.
Anyone on the Neuroflocks page was able to read live streaming tweets or search for keywords search at a later time to read or retweet tweets pertaining to a topic of interest or one they missed. Our hope was for Neuroflocks to remedy the problem of not being able to be in 10 places at once as there are many sessions going on at all the same time and to keep others not able to attend the meeting, in the loop!
Thank you so much to all attendees who tweeted about anything and everything that was going on. Highlights of the conference can objectively be identified based on the tweets heatmap analysis in which many deemed Svante Paabo's lecture of A Neanderthal Perspective on Human origin, Alan Leshner's "Brain on Trial" and the public forum on the obesity epidemic (to mention a few), tweet worthy.
Looking forward to #sfn12!
Stay tuned to NeuroFlocks and SciPle.org more exciting news to come!!
We had 12 participants (this is disappointing..) and most of them had very optimistic guessings (up to ~20k tweets!!!)
From 12.Nov to 16.Nov We collected ~5K (4990) tweets using the #sfn11 hastag (a big jum from #sfn10: click here for details).
But what is REALLY impressive is @stolowmas guessing: 4995 !!!
Congratulations @stolowmasyou are the winner of our contest! we stronlgy encourage you to play the lottery/bingo as soon as possible!