So you’ve heard of Twitter, but think it’s all about people sharing what they had for breakfast, fawning over celebrities and the boring minutiae of people’s lives. Well, it is, but it’s many other things too - it’s great for sharing experiences, knowledge and opinions. And for me, one of its best uses is for having conversations about conferences.

With the Institute of Fundraising National Convention coming up next week, this could be a great time to try it out. For a start, the nice people at the IoF have created their own Twitter account for the event (at http://twitter.com/natconvention) so you can ‘follow’ everything they have to say about the conference. But what may be even more useful, is to follow the conversations other attendees are having – and you can do that by using a hashtag of #iofnc.

Briefly, a hashtag is a way of collating conversations on Twitter about a particular topic – so if everyone who’s talking about a session at the convention puts the #iofnc hashtag in their tweet (like so), you can find all the individual tweets about the convention by doing a Twitter search for that hashtag. Click here and you’ll see what I mean.

If you want a real-time update of the tweets without having to refresh your browser, you could also try sites like monitter or twitterfall, or take a look at a tag cloud of related words by using tweetcloud.

Another great site to use to keep track of your thoughts on the sessions is a live blogging site called Scribblelive. The great thing about this site is that others can join in and write what they think too, and you can automatically pull in tweets tagged with a specific hashtag. It’s a really useful way to write down your notes on the talks and keep them for posterity, as well as getting other people’s opinions on the talks – I mean, does anyone ever take a look at the notes they’ve made at conferences after the event and bother writing them up? See the live blogging done at the IoF technology conference for an example of how this works.

Personally, I’m looking forward to following the stream of comments on all the talks at this year’s conference, as I don’t think I’ll get to see many talks first hand. But that’s the beauty of Twitter at conferences – you don’t even need to be there to hear what people are talking about, as the conversations are happening online all at the same time.

Looking at the number of people already using the hashtag #iofnc I imagine there will be quite a few people tweeting from the event, certainly a few more than the three of us who were tweeting from it last year!

P.S. It would be remiss of me not to mention that I’ll be at the convention for the three days from Monday too (say hi at stand 38!) as we’ve got a number of ten-minute ‘Bitesize’ sessions taking place at the JustGiving stand.