Thinking Digital 08

I was lucky enough to get tickets for the Codeworks, Thinking Digital conference last week. The conference consisted of a mix of home grown and international speakers, talking about everything technical from the latest nano technologies, to the environmental damage technology is bringing to the deep seas. There were discussions on social networking, the need for happiness, risk management, and the future of media and entertainment. With talks from leading on entrepreneurs and case studies on areas like micro financing and international arts projects.

The 3 day conference at the Sage Gateshead and Baltic, saw around 400 delegates, visiting the region. This provided a great opportunity for some social networking of the traditional kind, and of the twitter variety. For those of you not familiar with twitter, twitter is a bit like instant messaging, but rather than being a private chat between 2 people (tweets as they are known) are broadcast, so that any number of followers can pick them up at the same time. With a room of say 150 people, there were at points maybe 50 people with laptops, pdaís and smart phones having a parallel discussion about the talk, as it went on. One of the strangest aspects of the phenomenon seemed to be the openness of the group at least a few of those that were using twitter were the conference speakers themselves.

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