It looks like Jim Groom and Alan Levine need to put their heads together and release Conferencing 2.0 or 3.0 or wherever we are now.

As an outsider, I appreciated the ELI conference Twittering– it reminded me a lot of the Emerging Technology Conference’s IRC channel (that’s what you get in a geek audience, even though Twitter was on everyone’s tongue at last year’s event) without anywhere near as much snark… though clearly sometimes snark is the only respondsThat makes sense, though, because (unless you delete constantly) Tweets are out there on the record after the event… IRC chat (including all the insights, links, and hijinx) is generally lost when the event is over, or certainly not readily indexed and available high in Google search returns.

I still missed the traditional liveblogging, though with more podcasts being made available every day that desire will probably fade. I’m not sure what the answers are, but I’ve talked about remaking conferences (in a different context) before. It’s frustrating as a speaker, too, where even small deviations from the established format are rarely accepted and difficult to implement.