#OOW10 Five tips to follow Oracle OpenWorld 2010 on Twitter

For the first time in several years, I will not be attending Oracle OpenWorld. And even if you are attending Oracle OpenWorld, the firehose is often so wide that you don't get a good sense of everything that is going on.

If you are a Twitter user, here are five tips that will help you get the most from your OpenWorld experience.

TIP 1: FOLLOW THE OFFICIAL ORACLE ACCOUNTS. Obviously you want to follow the @oracleopenworld Twitter account, and you'll probably want to follow @oracle. But remember that Oracle OpenWorld covers a whole...um..."stack" of information, so for information specific to your interest, you might want to follow a more specific Oracle account. In my case, one of those accounts is @OracleDatabase.

TIP 2: FOLLOW (AND USE) THE OFFICIAL ORACLE OPENWORLD 2010 HASHTAG #OOW10. Hashtags are a convenient way to mark that a tweet is relevant to a specific topic. Oracle has suggested that if you're tweeting about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, use the hashtag #oow10.

To join and/or follow the conversation related to next week's Oracle OpenWorld 2010, please use the following hashtag #OOW10

So if you tweet about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, use #OOW10. And if you want to find tweets about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, go to http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23OOW10.

And you don't have to just limit it to Twitter. For example, not only have I included the #OOW10 in the title of this blog post (which ensures that when the blog post title is tweeted, the hashtag will be there), but I've also used it as a tag for the post itself (in Blogger terms, a "label"). Go ahead and use it when you upload photos to Flickr. Incorporate it into your Foursquare check-ins. Whatever gets you through the night - whoops, wrong year for that musical reference.

TIP 3: FOLLOW OTHERS WITH THE SAME INTEREST. Once you start looking at everyone who is using the #OOW10 hashtag, you'll find out that A LOT of people are tweeting about Oracle OpenWorld 2010. If their interests coincide with your own, follow them. This will give you additional information.

TIP 4: CHECK OUT THE ORACLE LISTS. Twitter allows its users to create lists that can be focused on different topics, relevant or irrelevant. And a bunch of people have set up lists that are specific to Oracle. Here are a few:

http://twitter.com/eddieawad/oracle
http://twitter.com/surachart/oracle
http://twitter.com/Radu43/oracle
http://twitter.com/fuadar/oracle
http://twitter.com/theappslab/friends-of-appslab
http://twitter.com/jpiwowar/oracletweeps

There are, of course, many others.

TIP 5: MAKE YOUR OWN LIST(S), BUT DO IT NOW. In fact, you may get the best bang for your Euro by applying this tip and ignoring most of my other tips. If you were to truly follow every account that tweeted about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, your Twitter feed would be extremely busy. So instead of doing all that, why not just create your own list, put your favorite Oracle-related Twitter users in that list, and go from there? However, if you're going to create your own list, I STRONGLY advise that you do it now, before you are overwhelmed by the Moscone madness.

Obviously this list doesn't include all of the wonderful people on Twitter, or all the things you can do with Twitter, and it completely ignores other avenues of #OOW10 communication (Flickr, etc.). So if you are convinced - and you probably are - that I missed a very important tip for following Oracle OpenWorld 2010 online, please add it to the comments.