Having live-tweeted the entirety of BackboneConf, I would like to object to a premise of your comment and the original post.
Live-tweeting well is hard. It is not simply tuning out, or not focusing on the presentation. It's actually exactly the opposite. You have to listen intently and synthesize what a speaker is saying into succinct statements. Having done this 8 hrs a day for two days, I can tell you that it's about as mentally taxing a task as one can engage in (and i'm not saying that because i have a stake in whether live tweeting succeeds or not. I'm saying it because i wanted to find out how difficult it was to live-tweet an event, and I thought BackboneConf was a worthwhile event to disseminate to a wider audience).
Live-tweeting well is hard. It is not simply tuning out, or not focusing on the presentation. It's actually exactly the opposite. You have to listen intently and synthesize what a speaker is saying into succinct statements. Having done this 8 hrs a day for two days, I can tell you that it's about as mentally taxing a task as one can engage in (and i'm not saying that because i have a stake in whether live tweeting succeeds or not. I'm saying it because i wanted to find out how difficult it was to live-tweet an event, and I thought BackboneConf was a worthwhile event to disseminate to a wider audience).