Follow DrupalCon DC on Twitter

In case you didn't know, DrupalCon DC starts this Wednesday! The biggest Drupal conference yet will be held 4 - 7 March in snowy Washington DC. You can read more about the event in Dries' post. The previous Drupalcon was in Szeged (hungary) and the first one which we attended. It made a great impression and we certainly will attend the next one in Paris, but we'll have to follow DC through other means.

Howto follow DrupalCon on Twitter
Thanks to the wonders of modern communication - and especially Twitter - it is now possible to follow big events through many, many people who are microblogging about the event and the sessions they attend. With the popularity of Twitter rising, you can get great live feeds.

If you already are a twitter user, you can follow the official twitter.com/drupalcon. Find tweets about drupalcon by using the #drupalcon hashtag. (If you don't know what a hashtag is, read my post about Twitter first)

You can search for #drupalcon tagged tweets using the search page, which will show you realtime results. However there are two small problems with this page:

1. you have to refresh the page to see new tweets (though you will be notified there are new tweets through an ajax call)
2. you can't follow multiple hashtags on one page. #Drupalcon might be the official one, but undoubtly there will be people who use #dcdc or #drupalcondc.

There is a simple solution:  creative developers who use the Twitter API to create an app like Twitterfall. This app will show you popular hashtags but also allows to enter your own custom ones. And it will automatically show new tweets in realtime!

It's the next best thing to attending ;)

If you know about betters apps which do the trick, please share. Oh, and if you're interested in the next Drupalcon in Europe (Paris, september 2009) follow @dcparis2009.