People who pay lots of money (or their employer's money) to fly to a conference and then sit in the sessions tweeting or surfing the web as though it were a slow day at the office are ultimately just impoverishing their own mind (like the people who don't have the patience to read books or who hate movies that don't do all the thinking for them). They are only dimly aware of what's going on around them and shut out s…
Live-tweeting well is hard. It is not simply tuning out, or not focusing on the presentation. It's actually exactly the opposite. You have to listen intently and synthesize what a speaker is saying into succinct statements. Having done this 8 hrs a day for two days, I can tell you that it's about as mentally taxing a task as one can engage in (and i'm not saying that because i have a stake in whether live tweeting succeeds or not. I'm saying it because i wanted to find out how difficult it was to live-tweet an event, and I thought BackboneConf was a worthwhile event to disseminate to a wider audience).