Nov. 1 Jeff Pulver’s Small Town 140 Character Conference made a stop in Hutchinson, Kan., at the Historic Fox Theatre.
This was a huge deal. The 140 Character Conference has made stops in places like New York City, Los Angeles, London and Tel Aviv. For it to come to Kansas was incredible.
Sadly, though, I wasn’t able to attend. My good friend Cort Anderson did, though. He was actually one of the speakers.
He presented about how newspapers are important, especially in small-town communities.
Here is a link to a video of his presentation:
I love journalism and newspapers. I’m glad he spoke about this. Good work, Cort.
If you would like to know more about the Small Town 140 Character Conference, here is some information I found, and you can visit the website at smalltown.140conf.com:
“. . . we have explored the effects of twitter on a wide range of topics including: Celebrity, “The Media”, Advertising, Politics, Fashion, Real Estate, Music, Education, Public Safety, Public Diplomacy and quite a few other topics. #140conf Small Town will be a ground breaking opportunity to look at the effects of the real-time web on the people and the businesses inside of and around Small Towns. I thank Becky McCray for being the inspiration behind this event and for her help and leadership in making this event happen.
How do you define “small town”?
While we could set a dividing line of population, we aren’t going to. We mean to include small towns and rural areas, outlying suburbs and exurbs. Plus, plenty of people who live in a big city have some important small town connection, whether that’s where you grew up, where you plan to move, where your parents came from, or where your clients are.
If you are excited about small towns and want to be part of the discussion, we want you to join us.
What’s different about 140Conf?
The #140conf events provide a platform for the worldwide twitter community to: listen, connect, share and engage with each other, while collectively exploring the effects of the emerging real-time internet on business. It creates serendipity in talking to each other, sharing ideas across industries, and exchanging thoughts with people like you and not like you. To put it in rural terms, we’re going to cross-pollinate some ideas. Or think of it as hybrid vigor: your new ideas are much stronger than the ideas that brought them about.
Our schedule will be unique and fast paced. It is our intention to provide a platform for as many people as possible to share their thoughts and engage in conversation with the attending delegates. You will find individual talks set to: 10 minutes; “Featured talks” 15 and the various panel discussions are set for 15 and 20 minutes.
The take aways from this event will provide the attending delegates knowledge, perspectives and insights to the effects the real-time internet will have on both “we” the people, business and society.
Come prepared to share. We want you to create content and share the conversation. That means yes, bring your video camera. Bring your camera. Interview each other. Tweet and blog during the event. One limit: no live-streaming of video by audience members, because it will kill our bandwidth. We will have an official conference live-stream show on the 140Conference Ustream channel.”
Keep in mind, I could go on for days and days about why people should support local news and how great I think it is that Cort used his time at the world-recognized 140 Character Conference to talk about it. I will save you from that for now, though. Just watch the video. It’s worth it.
We missed you, Todd. We had 8 out of our original group of ten bloggers from the 2009 tour. Cort did a great presentation and took about 2000 photos. I hope you’ll be able to join us next year.