Backchannels are all the rage at tech events these days, connecting presenter and audience like never before. They allow audiences to get more value from a presentation by communicating with each other about it. And the audience can feed back to the presenter, which helps him stay on track and know that he is being understood.

But there’s a point where a backchannel goes beyond adding interactivity to an event and begins to undermine the event itself. In November, I witnessed this at the launch of UXMTL, a community for user experience design in Montreal.

Twitter has made setting up backchannels trivially easy — with or without the consent of conference organizers — since anyone can start a Twitter backchannel simply by using a hashtag. Unlike Google Moderator or Backnoise, no specialized software is needed. At UXMTL, the event organisers simply announced that audience members should use the hashtag #uxmtl on Twitter, and all tweets for that tag were displayed on a large screen behind the panelists, using Twitterfall. For me, this completely changed my experience of the event, both as an audience member and a backchannel contributor.

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For anyone who missed it, Alistair had an interesting (and popular) post on watchingwebsites.com about how speeding up performance improves online business.   The data was gathered through some experimentation that Alistair helped us run with some Strangeloop customers.  Through the experiments, we were able to draw a direct link between web performance and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the business, getting us closer to the holy grail of showing, in business terms, why performance matters.  Alistair presented the data in a joint webinar with Strangeloop in October.

Next tuesday, December 8th, I’ll be revisiting the data and presenting them again at the Velocity Online Conference, which is O’Reilly’s online version of the Velocity Conference.   The online version is also co-chaired by Steve Souders and Jesse Robbins, will run for half the day, and includes some pretty interesting presentations on topics that range from Varnish to SPDY to Steve’s impressive Browserscope initiative.  I’m excited to be a part of it and am looking forward to playing Alistair’s proxy in presenting the data, not to mention listening in on the other presentations.

I encourage all to attend.  And knowing how much Bitcurrent’s inquisitive readers will surely be interested in the event, I got us a bit of a discount too.  Here are all the pertinent details:

• URL: http://en.oreilly.com/velocityfall09
• Cost: $149 (25% off with discount code “velfall09pcd”)
• When: Tuesday, December 8th, 9am-12:40pm PT

Hope to see you there.

I’m at IGT09 this week, put together by the energetic Avner Algom. Yesterday, I gave a presentation on the ROI of cloud computing (including some data that IDC and Peter Van Eijk were nice enough to let me use.) We started off with a panel on enterprise cloud use, with four panelists from very different backgrounds:

• Steve Rubinow, EVP and CIO of NYSE Euronext
• Yosi Shneck, CIO, Israeli Light Company
• Eyal Waldman, Co-founder & CEO, Mellanox
• Liam Lynch, Chief Security Strategist, eBay

Here are the slides, including panel questions.