Organizing & Curating Events: #Pearltrees Meets #140Conf

I have written about Jeff Pulver's 140 Characters Conference (more known by its now popular hashtag #140conf) on more than one occasion, starting with his first Los Angeles event now more than a year ago. He has since held events in Tel Aviv, London, New York, Boston, San Francisco and other locations, with more on the way, including a small town one in the Midwest.

What I love about his events (and no, I don't work for him :-) is that he pulls together passionate people who know how to tell really compelling and engaging stories rather than pitch them or throw insights out on a panel on the "same ole same ole" topic with the "same ole same ole" people. Let's face it, life is about storytelling. Branding is about storytelling. Kids are about storytelling. Money is about storytelling. And when we perk up and pay attention, its because of a really good story, one with passion and authenticity behind the 'voice.'

I wrote about some of the 'characters' who participated in the LA event in a post last week.

And in the same week, I posted a number of videos of many of the heartwarming storytellers, entertainers and performers who spoke in LA. Just search for 140 conference or 140conf on the We Blog the World YouTube Channel to find them all.

Finding and sifting through content after an event is overwhelming isn't it? It's overwhelming because A) there is simply too much content out there, B) search is not perfect nor is it customized for the way we (humans) think and C) there are simply too many 'channels' and social media outlets where things are posted.

In an effort to get more organized and save time searching, browsing and reading, Pearltrees can be a useful way for you to organize and curate content the way you want to see it. Why count on a generic, broad search engine or a geeky bookmarking service to display your world of interests and passions?

Below is the Pearltree I created just for the 140 Conference in Los Angeles, which includes customized pearltrees for each of the categories I decided to curate. In other words, I created a Pearltree for just women attendees, another for speakers, one for entertainment tweeters, educators and moms who are using social media in interesting ways and so on.

And, notice that I have embedded the Pearltree inside my blog post, which was as easy to do it is to embed a YouTube video. Copy and paste the code baby and you're done. It takes seconds to share it with an audience! Imagine the branding opportunities here.

To give you an idea of how easy it is to customize and share, below is the Pearltree I created at the Los Angeles event that contains only 'women tweeters/attendees', making it a great way to keep tabs on people's activity in one central place.

You can bounce from pearl to pearl faster than you can from web browser to web browser, getting quick updates at a quick glance. It also helps you find content quickly and readily and is a helluva lot more compelling to look at than a long geeky bookmarking list. I did the same thing for speakers.

Below is a Pearltree I created for the entire 140 Characters Conference, which includes links to the schedules of other city-hosted events Pulver plans to have or has had, i.e., Boston, San Fran, Detroit, London and so on.

Below is a screen grab that I took to show you how you can organize your Pearltrees within greater folders/or pearls if you like. My 140 Conference Pearl is within a Pearltree I call Conferences & Events, but you can slice and dice it however you choose, since you, are the curator and organizer, not Google. Here's a link to how Techcrunch Disrupt was curated using Pearltrees, a very effective way to capture the best of (or all of) an event. Refreshing isn't it?