Human forms of real-time telemetry …
This is an excellent article with a prime example of the future implications of mobile/wireless networking and various applications. Esther is writing about what occurred at one of her conferences when some of the attendees were blogging in real time during the conference … providing real-time “telemetry” about the conference proceedings.

We started to do this type of things years ago at Novell when we would use Instant Messaging and Chat during internal road-map review meetings. A large group of us were able to multiplex between the presentations and our group anaylsis without generating verbal side conversations. This also allowed us to ask questions and opinions between the members of our team to minimize the need to interupt the speaker.

All of this culminated with an application that I wrote called LiVote … for Live-Vote … that was an experiment in allowing a group of people to see a group of questions about a presenter or their presentation. Under each issue is a slider that allows each person to “vote” on that issue and rate it between 0 and 10. Below each slider is a bar graph that shows the “average” rating of all of the voters. So I can now be giving real-time feedback on my opinions … to my team … and potentially to the speaker!

I have thought about completing this application in a way that could be utilized at future conferences. Maybe I’ll have to bring it back to life and touch base with Dan Gilmore about it … 😉

Esther Dyson on the connection between blogging and face to face conferences.  [Scripting News]