I went to Bath for openMIC this week (part conference, part barcamp – a brilliant and informative day on innovation in mobile).
The first half was made up of traditional conference-style presentations, and during one of these presentations, I noticed tweets with the #openMIC hashtag become particularly active: feedback that the presenter was missing.
I wondered about ways that the presenter could have got that feedback before finishing his talk…
This isn’t a new idea: I’ve heard of large US tech conferences where the backchannel is displayed on a second screen or projector next to the presenter’s slides. But I rarely get the chance to present where there is the facility for projecting to two screens at once.
So I got thinking about how a compromise could work: embedding a live twitter search somewhere within a presentation.
I had a bit of free time this afternoon to play with the idea a little more. As is sadly often my way, my first few ideas were needlessly overcomplicated: using macros, VBScript or something like that to try and get data from the web and embed it within my slides.
Fiddly. And prone to a number of fundamental issues, such as trying to avoid reloading the twitter search every time you change slide.
But then I had a flash of what, for want of a better word, I shall call ‘genius’. 😉
Instead of fighting to embed a website within a presentation, what about embedding a presentation within a webpage?
A little bit of playing around with code, and I managed to pull a quick proof-of-concept together.
I started the test at home this morning, when I normally start checking my emails and twitter. And it’s been running all day. While in my office, the phone was on my desk. The rest of the time it’s been in my pocket.
This post is a complete sample for creating a Firefox extension to add a button to the browser toolbar. When you click on the button, it grabs the URL from the Firefox address bar and does something with it.
There was a lot of discussion about how this information could be used to make a difference.