Like Eric, I would also like there to be ways to better sort the different conversations that happen under one hashtag. It honestly gets unwieldy to use multiple hashtags after a while. But I would also like to see there be a way to easily tell what a hash tag is for. It’s not unusual for me to see hashes in my tweetstream but to have a very hard time pinning down what event is being referred to. In some ways, then, I want my perfect backchannel to allow me to click a hash that redirects not simply to a page of all the posts grouped under the hash but instead to a page with all the posts and some basic information about the event and who has been posting/tweeting about it to this point. Better on-the-fly analysis tools would be great.

And while we’re on the fly, how about trending topics within the hash tag itself?

As far as what you need in a conference vs what you need in the classroom, I think one issue is scale. When I’ve used backchannels in classes, things do not fly as fast and furious as they do at a #thatcamp or #mla. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I think that it ends up making the participants miss the excitement of the real-time medium. I don’t know really how to fix this–inserting a delay breaks the real time.

One more thing that the current backchannel doesn’t support well is longer posts. But I suppose there is always Deck.ly…

I think it would be hard to move away from Twitter being the core, since that’s so well-established. But, it does also need to be mediated/augmented in some way to bring in the functionality Eric describes, and that we’ll discover we want at the session.

I imagine Twitter + Gowalla : you check in your Twitterstream to the conference and session — the mental space — you are at. In Twitter, To avoid hashtag fatigue, that’d ideally be something that could be included once in a tweet and whatever is doing the processing/augmenting would remember that until there’s a new checkin.

One option, bring the hash-bang #! into twitter to check-in a twitterstream, e.g. “@samplereality starting #!backchannel at #THATCamp” and an app already knows about #!backchannel and checks my twitterstream into it until I checkin somewhere else. Just a starting idea

On a more yacky angle, I’m wondering if “backchannel” is still the best word. I’m seeing it as more and more as another mediation of the sessions, on par with a slideshow at a session being one mediation of it. I’m wondering if reframing/blowing up what that backchannel really is will help us identify more of what we do and do not want it to do.

In other words, I’d love the option to visually and intellectually make a distinction between the backchannel discussion for the session I’m attending and the one for the session that’s happening in the room next to ours and the one that’s going on downstairs in the ballroom at the same time. Usually I want to be able to see them all–I just want to be able to keep straight which session is being discussed.

So . . . make that happen. 😉