I’m in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo. Tomorrow morning I present a 3 hour workshop on SEO/SMO along with co-presenter Muhammad Saleem. Then on Wednesday afternoon I present a breakout session titled “Best-kept Secrets to SEO Success: the Art and the Science.”

This year I’ve come to the Web 2.0 Expo armed with Twitter. Last year at this time when I spoke at Web 2.0 Expo, I had barely given Twitter any notice. I’m looking forward to tuning in to the “back channel” and getting the additional perspective on the happenings of the show. (I just hope the Web 2.0 Expo wiki isn’t an indication of what’s in store for Twitterers at the Web 2.0 Expo: the Twitteroll only lists a dozen people.)

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos is into Twitter. (He’s on @zappos if you want to follow him). Tony blogged an idea that I quite liked:

Seeing all the Twitter comments about Zappos during the presentation, I thought for future presentations, it might be interesting to display all the Twitter comments in real-time, even asking audience members to vote on which topics to talk more about… It would be a way to make future presentations relevant to what each audience actually wants to hear.

His idea of displaying a live Twitter stream while presenting is a good one, and it reminded me of the IgniteWeb2Expo that I attended last year at the Web 2.0 Expo. It was a series of 5-minute lightning rounds, where each presenter had 20 slides, a hard stop at 5 minutes, and each slide advanced automatically after 15 seconds. It was based on the Ignite events in Seattle.

At IgniteWeb2Expo, they used Mozes, rather than Twitter, for audience commenting and voting on the speakers. The voting worked out great – the top four speakers were “promoted” to speaking slots at the keynote later in the week. One of those winning speeches was from my favorite authors, Tim Ferriss, in fact.

The attendees used Mozes for heckling too, to great effect. One snide remark in particular was really memorable.. One of the speakers was a guy in a bad suit that looked like he just walked out of a Miami Vice episode. When the message “don johnson called. he needs his suit back” appeared on the screen, the audience started cracking up. The poor guy didn’t have a clue he was being mocked, he just kept on presenting!