Make Your Own Conference Dashboard

September 18, 2008 · Comments

BWE-Dashboard-shrunk

Christopher S. Penn had a really useful idea about a social media dashboard. His had all kinds of great news information, as if you were the press. Me? I’m hacking the idea for the upcoming conferences I’m attending. Only, I don’t know what else I’d want to see in there.

So, I think YOU should do something better with my idea.

Conference Dashboard

Let’s make a “dashboard” using a tool like iGoogle to “see” the elements you might want to know about at a conference. Thus, whenever you have web access, you can get a fast scan of a lot of data that might prove useful during the event. Here’s the steps I took to start the project.

  1. Log into iGoogle (or NetVibes or Page Flakes.
  2. Add some search strings from Twitter Search for the event. (Oooh, I just realized that I’ll want to add “Las Vegas” for my Blog World Expo one.)
  3. Add a local map.
  4. Add a news feed. (Nice to know if Godzilla is invading the city where your conference is being held.)
  5. Add a chat client (if that floats your boat).
  6. Add a Technorati search for the event

Voila: a functional conference dashboard.

Even as I’ve started this, I can see lots of other things to add: Flickr tag searches, for instance.

Make YOUR Own Dashboard

What would you want to see? How would you change this? What other kinds of gadgets or widgets or feeds would you add to the above?

Why not make your own “Conference Dashboard” post and see what you can do with the basic premise? If you’re not attending any events soon, how about a “local dashboard” for your town or village?

Make sure you link back here, so I’ll know to go and check out what you’ve created.

Questions?

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  • great idea : I'd like to see some liveblogging (like Cover it Live) and transcripts in. So if you can't attend one stream, can get the gist of others'.
  • Julius
    great idea!

    julius
  • I go to conferences to reconnect with friends and acquaintances and meet more. Therefore the most important thing to me is "who's going?".

    I like derek's live-blogging idea, and then after the conference, you'd like to get links to all the media (session streaming, interviews) that were generated during it (esp. the incriminating photos taken during the after-after-parties :).

    So I guess you could think of this in three contexts, before, during and after the conference, right?

    Before: Who's going, when/where will we meet up, what sessions I'm going to (published out so other dashboards can see what *you're* doing), hotel/travel arrangements, what gear should I take.

    During: What's your 20? Who's here and where are they? Let's hook up for breakfast/lunch/dinner/party. Live-blogging/twittering, session back-channels (ooo, yeah!), I met so-and-so and *you* really need to talk to them about blah.

    After: Find lost business cards (I met you at the so-and-so session and we talked about widgets). Of course, all media associated with the event. Again, who went.
  • Depends on the conference. I would link in Eventful RSS feeds, Upcoming.org to see who's posting on it there. Put the conference in Twitter search to pull mentions of it, pull hashtags, add in the feeds and streams of speakers and keynotes who will be presenting to see what they have to say, grab your own network updates from LinkedIn via RSS to see if any of your contacts are also going, put an expense tracker widget there so you remember to do that... the beat goes on.
  • Chris - Left a comment - I thought - but it didn't make it! :) This is a great post, and it got me thinking about an article I wrote long ago - which I just updated and posted on my blog - How to Get the Most Out of Your Conference Investment - http://www.kevineikenberry.com/blogs/2008/09/ho...

    See you in Las Vegas!

    Kevin :)
  • Use Twitter, get references from twitter and go from there!
    Already use netvibes.com for my personal social media sanity check!
  • MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer dashboard:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/financialaidpodcas...
  • Very handy -- anyone else prefer iGoogle/NetVibes to the classic RSS reader? I like being able to see headlines and scan through sections based on groups; haven't used it for a conference yet but my local home page is a lot better than the newspaper!
  • I set up a pageflake for bathcamp: http://www.pageflakes.com/bathcamp

    I'd been looking forward to the event, but had to drop out at the last minute. I wanted to (easily) keep track of what happened.

    I pinched the idea from @davebriggs (http://davepress.net) who did the same thing for a barcamp last year: http://www.pageflakes.com/barcampukgovweb
  • The next step is to add a little processing to the feeds (filtering for keywords or popularity, eliminating duplicates). If you want to get fancy, it's not hard to put the result on a web page, such as the one Marshall Kirkpatrick described:

    http://marshallk.com/how-to-build-an-rss-and-bl...
  • Aloha,
    Great idea. I think that we could do it for projects too where what we want public is shown and then it is necessary to sign in to see some details or to post new material, documents, etc.
    Dan

    P.S. I do subscribe to Chris's RSS feed through Google Reader -- which works very well!
  • Beautiful idea, done! I'm looking forward to watching this new page from Blogworld this weekend.
  • Hello everyone.
    I am new here, and I'm glad that found this place.
  • Looks pretty cool but definately useless at the moment for me.
  • I don't really go to conferences that much but I do use a dashboard to assist my social media run each day.
  • This is a cool idea. The folks at the Inbound Marketing Summit did something similar where they created a page that linked to Twitter search for the event, pulled in Flickr photos of the event into a slideshow, listed blog articles about the event and also videos about the event and even some audio podcasts.

    http://www.InboundMarketingSummit.com/stream
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