Heliophage

An avian emplacement approach to cetacean albedo ehancement

As mentioned, I twittered the geoengineering session I just posted on: http://preview.tinyurl.com/CopehagenGeoengTweets. I am sure there would have been better ways to do so — I am an egg in these matters. Glad to hear feedback and advice, but in the meantime here’s my self-assessment, FWIW.

a) some of the tweets are, to be kind to myself, hard to parse:

Battisti: if field testing need to look at monitoring capacity in order to differentiate results from background

b) as a form of note taking, not too bad; looking back on them, the tweets cover a lot of the key points I would have wanted people to take away. And a few dashes of levity too.

c) They were helpful to me as a focusing mechanism. Often I will drift off in some talks, or even leave a session. The self imposed twitter  discipline meant that i had to be on top of each presentation enough to get 140 characters out of it.

d) also time efficient: there’s an (admittedly perhaps challenging) 800 words of reasonably useful commentary there. If it had been done afterwards, would have taken time away from caffeination and schmoozing. And wouldn’t have mentioned as many aspects of what was said.

e) that said, if done afterwards, would have been shaped, balanced and more clearly analytic. Looking at this stream, you might think Zeng’s presentation on burying trees marked an exciting new idea. Don’t think it did; but tweeting its main points I forgot to tweet scepticism.

f) and if done afterwards — as a post here, say –  the set would have had its own URL,  findable by google, and been categorised for users of the blog. By using the advanced search function it’s possible to get them all on a page that stands some chance of staying stable, but whether that really lasts, who knows?  And they will not show up in searches for geoengineering because I didn’t have the characters to spare for such a long word.

g) Even if people could  find them, not sure they would gain much thereby.  People who have a real interest in geoengineering might find them of some interest or use: probably not terribly helpful, if at all, for a broader audience.

h) it would have had more value, perhaps, if other people had also been tweeting. But that seems more likely to happen at the sort of meetings where @doctorow and @timoreilly are to be found than around here.

Some questions: Too many tweets, or too few? Would TinyUrls for the abstracts of each talk have helped enough to make up for the loss of characters entailed? Was value added?

Will I do this again? Dunno.