For the next 10 days or so, we’ll have the privilege and the pleasure of teaching at the Stanford Professional Publishing Course.

What’s not to like? The campus is drop-dead gorgeous. We rub elbows with smart, interesting participants and faculty from all over the world. And at the course climax a week from Saturday, we get to watch the participants pitch their always-amazing ideas for launching hypothetical publishing companies that they will have invented as part of a five-day frenzied exercise.

This year, we thought we’d try adding Twitter to the mix, partly because a number of sessions will focus on moving beyond print and adopting more future-oriented publishing strategies. As an experiment, we’ve established a conference Twitter (sppclive) to serve up housekeeping announcements, schedule changes, reminders, and other bulletins.

Repeat: This is an experiment. Given that we’ll be sneaking in “tweets” around the edges of our official duties, and seeing as how Twitter’s unreliability is legendary, no one who is participating in the course should depend on the sppclive Twitter as the main source of conference information and updates. Still, we hope it will help participants gain a first-hand feel for microblogging, something that everyone in publishing should do.

We’re also going to try talking some participants into helping us “cover” the conference live through an
aggregation of tagged tweets coming from their own, individual Twitter accounts. Tech-oriented conferences are doing this more and more these days. The trick is that correspondents include a conference-specific tag in every posting. Ours will be “#sppc08.”

With any luck, tweets will be flying in from a bunch of conference-goers. And anyone who wants an aggregated, near real-time view of these front-line reports should be able to find it on the appropriate search results page at Summize, a site dedicated to searching tweets.

We’ll report back on all this after the conference. Meanwhile, feel free to tune in.