Tweeting from a conference.

If you are following me on twitter you will have noticed many #comet09 tweets in the last two days. There will be more tomorrow as the conference finishes in the afternoon. So what was it about? COMET is an interdisciplinary conference in communication, medicine and ethics. It moves around the world and this year was on my doorstep in Cardiff so too good an opportunity to miss.

I decided to tweet because I thought the content would be interesting to quite a few of the people I know on Twitter. And it was. Some of the things that happened:

• @jrbtrip found out what an old colleague was up to
• @hadleybeeman and I had a discussion about whether patients had the right to not engage in partnership with their GP in their care
• @mrhyde found out about some research on how people who are obese access information on the internet.
• @vmontori who was a co-author of some work that my colleague presented was kept up to date although he was still on the other side of the Atlantic.
• @casesnetwork kept up to date with Brian Huritz's lecture.

And after seeing a presentation about using multiple modalities in drug patient information leaflets I remembered that I had seen a lightning talk about this last week at Health Camp but couldn't remember who. I tweeted and had the answer before the speaker had finished her presentation.

I do seem to have been the only person tweeting from COMET 09, but I predict that come COMET 10 in Boston there will be a few more. This was not about providing a backchannel to the conference, but simply about bringing the contents of interesting dialogues to a wider audience. So if you are listening to someone stimulating, think about tweeting. The chances are that someone you know will be glad that you have made the effort to share.