I value efficiency and convenience very highly, so I’m often thinking of ways to improve upon both.

I was just reading an article in the SFWA Bulletin called “Learn How to Twitter” as I was curious what it would actually say. Something it talked about gave me an idea about convention networking–wouldn’t it be great if we could use Twitter to help organize stuff at conventions? Not for everyone, of course, but for we TwitterFolk. So what you do is, if you’re posting something about a convention while at the convention, you can use the hash mark + con name to make your Tweets findable in Twitter by anyone searching for it. So, for instance:

johnjosephadams: #wiscon anyone know of any parties tonight besides the one in room 256?

And then people can chime in. It would be like bringing the groupmind power of Twitter into the convention. Which would be awesome.

Also, it would be great if the concoms got in on the action and posted notes to #[convention name] if there are changes in the schedule or whatever. Surely at least one person on any concom uses Twitter, no?

And while I’m wishing for technological convention assistance, I think we’re at the point where we should expect and demand good, user-friendly electronic convention program books. I mean, if I create a bunch of program listings in Outlook, including all the information, such as room number, time, panelists, and program description, I can easily setup a whole convention program book, which can then be exported into any number of formats. The thing is–I’m never going to carry around my program book at all times, but I will always carry my iPhone, and I should be able to put the schedule on there with very little effort. This would also be great because I could download it from the website before leaving for the convention and that way I can actually browse through the schedule while traveling there; once I actually get to the convention it can be really hard, with all the people you want to talk to, to actually find time to sit and read through the program book.