By way of Jim Spellos’s blog, we found this great article on How To Cook Food in a Hotel Room. Hopefully, you won’t need this for your holiday meal. We all deserve a break.

This video from the site shows how to prepare oatmeal in your coffee pot. Enjoy!

We’ve got a question here at Pathable, and would like to solicit some input from readers. It concerns Twitter.

We know that there’s value in seeing all the tweets from everybody who attends a particular conference. This provides a snapshot of the zeitgeist (or tweetgeist, if you will) of the community of attendees: what’s on their mind, what they’re talking about, how they’re feeling. It can be viewed on a web page or projected on a wall, so that it becomes part of the event as the event unfolds.

My question is: to hash tag or not to hash tag?

Hash tags are short phrases preceded with a # (hash mark) that can be used to add context and aggregate tweets using services like Twitscoop. For example, if I were attending the Pathable Alternative Olympics, we might designate a hash tag for it, like #pathalol, and whenever I tweeted, I’d include it as part of my message:

First #pathalol gold medals have been awarded! Schwartz takes it!

People can subscribe to all tweets that contain the #pathalol hash tag and keep track of what’s going on at the event.

But what if you already have all the Twitter addresses of everyone who’s at the event? You can create an aggregate stream of all the tweets without requiring people to add hash tags. On the one hand, the hash tags allow attendees to distinguish the tweets relevant to the event from those not relevant, but it also requires extra work on all attendees’ parts, and many, if not most, may not participate.

So, my question for you is: given that Pathable already knows the Twitter names of all attendees at an event, is there any advantage to promoting a hash tag, or should we simply make use of all the tweets of attendees and be done with it?

Bonus question: recommendations for the best solution for projecting Twitter and other live activity on a wall at an event?