Twitter and Medical Conferences

In doing some research on Twitter's potential for medical libraries, I found quite a bit of chatter about the role of the social networking site at conferences. Twitter is making it possible to monitor conference events remotely, even to "attend" two presentations at once, one in person and one by searching for and following the hashtag terms, which function as keywords, suggested by the moderator.

For example, here is a transcript of one conference attendee's writeup, including a transcript of tweets with the hashtag "#pmc10," from the 6th annual Partners Conference on Personalized Medicine. While hashtagged terms are only searchable in Twitter for two weeks after posting, they can be valuable for people who want to follow a conference's proceedings in real time, and saved transcripts like the one shown here can preserve attendees' notes, reactions and statements for further use.