WHILE FLICKING THROUGH a few Christmas cards, some containing short letters from cousins separated by an ocean, I thought about some of the people I followed this year during live events. Sometimes I didn't attend the events and I learned valuable things from these modern day scribes.
Darragh @darraghdoyle Doyle thinks like a teleprompter. That wouldn't surprise a lot of people, because Darragh can face the camera and conduct very effective interviews. He spends a lot of the day-to-day world inside Boards.ie where he's a community manager. He's a highly-regarded "events blogger" and whenever we've been in the same venue, he has consistently out-performed my best efforts at tweeting. Darragh types, thinks and watches intently--all at once. It's also nice that he works towards accommodating diversity--even when that means acquiescing some of the high ground in the realm of online communications protocols.
Roseanne @enormous Smith can think in two languages and sometimes she tweets the same thoughts within the same two minutes while using two Twitter accounts to make her points. But it's not the bilingual skills that set her apart. And it's not her keyboard speed. It's her courtesy and passion for informing people that fuels events with exciting anticipation. Her infectious attitude makes reading about upcoming events with the Irish Internet Association a real pleasure. Her e-mail updates and pleasant phone demeanour make me realise how much I miss Dublin and all the activities in The Big Smoke. It's also important to mention that Roseanne knows how to juggle a bicycle while managing changes in her centre of gravity.
Sharon @sharonlflynn Flynn will probably be mortified if she discovers she's one of my favourite scribes. I remember how uneasy she felt when realising more than two people were tweeting from the same educational technology workshop in Dublin. I met Sharon while tweeting behind her. She was always a paragraph ahead of me when observing the same live event. After attending a few presentations with her in the same room, my tweeting felt like it had received a live peer review treatment. While attendees at other industry events discussed the protocol of tweeting (or typing or recording), Sharon was one of the first members of the Irish Learning Technology Association to simply apply the right tool to the task. A lively end-of-event discussion ensued about whether some kind of constraint should be placed on tweeting at ILTA conferences. When the naysaysers reviewed the cogent tweets offered by Sharon, they realised they were seeing the work of a professional scribe. You need that kind of talent at events that purport to educate.
Mark @marklittlenews Little has a presence because he's a scribe who broadcasts--really broadcasts, not just on YouTube. As an author and an investigative journalist, he thinks like a curator and points readers to information worth digesting. For me, living in a world where information gushes out of a firehose, Mark Little's perspective and analysis helps me maneuver through lifestreams of hundreds of people, knowing that if I stop to click and read what he recommends, I'll be looking at information that can easily serve me well. But most importantly, Mark Little is the Irish scribe who has vanquished banality on Twitter. I'm very interested in how he will take our online conversations to a new level through a start-up that promises to distill the wisdom in the crowd.
Brendan @brendanhughes has shared cogent flows of information in real time several times this year to those who listened to his tweets. He can compartmentalise and organise potentially divisive opinion into working chunks of information. I failed to contribute my fair share to a Social Media Working Group that Brendan chaired in 2009, something that I hope to remedy in the year ahead. The output of that working group has helped elevate the effective use of online social networking for many Irish businesses. In large measure, the positive result of the working group tracks back to the way Brendan edited disparate comments, often pursuing those inputs through one-on-one chats. I deeply appreciate his special converstional skill.
Simon @tupp_ed McGarr thinks with verbs. This certainly must be challenging because he spends a lot of time sparring with barristers. Simon has taken blogging up several levels, first into group blogging with Tuppenceworth and then into the realm of live blogging during major televised events in Ireland. Within a few years, his children will enjoy reading his archived twitterstream because Simon peppers many of his 140 characters with snippets from the high chair level. As a fellow father, I get a special pleasure at seeing Twitter being used as a diary for toddlers growing up. That said, Simon McGarr is one of a small group of Irish bloggers who understands the essential ingredients of active citizenship. Effective microblogging has a strong role to play in building civic values. I hope some of Simon's vision becomes part of the Ireland's second level curriculum before the end of the next decade.
