I find myself today attempting to digest the massive amounts of content that was generated from Saturday's TLT Symposium. There is a ton of great gems, both raw and refined, to mine from this mountain, and I am sure I will be at it for some time to come.
Lawrence Lessig's keynote was tremendous, as one would expect. I feel it succeeded in getting a lot of us thinking about new forms of expressions in the digital age. The one thing from his keynote that really tickled me was his use of the word "conversations" to describe the back-and-forth of internet content mashup fads (the kind of thing I attempted to describe in this post on LOLcats). I have never been able to quite put my finger on why I find this content form so fascinating, but just using that simple word put things in a little more focus for me. I still can't quite express my thoughts on this fully, yet. I really think what we see today is the nascent form of something that will be much bigger.
After the format of the day last year conspired against us getting much traffic at the hands-on tables, we were a little taken aback by large turnout for the hands-on room this year. We had to turn it into more of a presentation-style session on the fly. There were too many people for us to work one-on-one.
It was a great day, got to meet a lot of brilliant people, and finally got to speak in person with some whom I have previously only dealt with online. Just absorbing the high energy level of so many people makes the day worth it.
Hashtags, which I have not used before this event, totally impressed me. Check out the hashtags page for the symposium. Such a great way to pull together the tweets about the event and create an archive. Checkout the sidebar that pulls in pics, video, and blog posts using the same tag. Even though this site was mainly created around twitter, it really becomes a dashboard of sorts for all the media being generated. The tool hits both notes: simple, powerful. For me, twitter has been the lynchpin for finding info about the symposium. I wonder if more and more, with twitter being tied more deeply into the fabric of our lives, it will become the instrument for organically growing collections of content around various events and causes.
