As you may know, the Race Track Industry Program’s annual symposium is currently going on (december 8th – 11th). Normally you’d have to wait for someone to file a story, or a pal to send an email after they got back to their room, assuming they didn’t get too drunk at the cocktail party. But this year you have a variety of ways to follow along thanks to phones, twitter, RSS, widgets, chron jobs and symposium participants’ will to blather!

Over at Twitter, Patrick of Handride, Ed DeRosa of Thoroughbred Times, USHorseman and USHarnessRacing are tweeting their way through the conference. Several non-attendees, myself included, are also tweeting along with them. Most tweets are using #RTIP as a tag, this means you can easily follow anything posted with that tag.

If you don’t feel like visiting that page all afternoon long, which is when most of the action is happening, you can grab the RSS and let it come to you. Jessica has also set up a few ways to get the info. She’s got a page that pulls in all the tweets plus articles and a widget that pulls in all tweets with #RTIP (I’ve got one over there underneath my twitter thingie).

It’s fun to watch the comments in real time. During the “A Perspective for Racing – So Who in the World Thought Selling Shoes Online Would Work?” panel DeRosa tweets:

Racing does none of the stuff Zappos.com does to provide great service

DeRosa’s article is here.

During “Measuring the Impact of Racinos on Racing” USHarnessRacing said:

Report from Iowa shows decreases in statebreds in all breeds except standardbreds

and

This in relation to purses increasing over same time period

During the same panel, USHorseman noted:

Iowa study shows that live racing increases slot machine play

and

Scott Wells of Remington Park shows that large portion of top 200 wagerers at Remington Park are playing 40% slots and 60% horses

Jessica commented back to USHorseman:

Interesting. So live racing heightens urge to wager, but not necessarily on the horses?

To which he replied back:

Perhaps. But the numbers do show that racing is still a factor in the racino world

DeRosa, no doubt powered by caffeine and an iphone given his ability to file stories in near real time, recounts the panel here.

These are just some of the small samples of stuff coming out of the symposium, and it’s going on for 2 more days. If you have a chance to hang around the internets tomorrow, I’d definitely peak in on the conversations and even join in if you’re so inclined.