OUseful.Info, the blog…

Last week, NESTA hostedDelivering Digital Britain, a panel presentation on the Digital Britain interim report. The event was live streamed and audio and video replays are available at http://www.nesta.org.uk/delivering-digital-britain.

Just after the event, I persuaded @benosteen to reuse the Twitter scraping tools he used to deconstruct dev8d (Tracking conferences (at Dev8D) with python, twitter and tags) and turn them on the #carter hashtag that was being used to track the event. The results can be found here: tweets through Delivering Digital Britain.

Here’s the obligatory word cloud, courtesy of Wordle:

As yet another displacement activity, I took time last night out to do a first pass attempt at adding a Twitter commentary to Lord Carter’s presentation at the event – you can see it here (First Draft: Carter – Delivering Digital Brtitain at Nesta, tweetmash):

The tweets were pasted into Keynote, (which I forgot produces an ppt output that Slidenote despises), and the audio was grabbed using Audacity and a little piece of wire connecting the phones out to the microphone in on my laptop, as I played the Carter piece from the NESTA website…

I got the lead in and lead out timings wrong on the audio – there are quite a few slides dangling (and unseeable?) at the end of the presentation, but with 2am approaching as I finished off last night wasn’t minded to start over…

…although I did lay awake for a while wondering whether SMIL might be a way forward, and whether I could use the timestamp of each tweet (which is recorded in the spreadsheet) to synch the tweets against the audio, maybe even reusing a little pipework from Tweetshow/Twittershow along the way…?

Anyway, that’s for another day. What the above does show is that maybe there’s a way for people twittering to actually create post hoc “slides” for presentations that don’t have any (which may or may not be a good thing)? Twitter powered subtitles, maybe?!;-)

PS see also How to Present While People are Twittering , which got me thinking: just because the event is over doesn’t mean the legacy of the backchannel has to come to an end?

PPS here’s another in a similar vein to the previous PS – If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room.