Joanne Jacobs is Australian, an academic and a consultant in social networking technologies. So when she presented at 2gether08, on lifecasting and microblogging, she offered a great mix, catering for distant friends viewing the webcast and giving us plenty of stats as well as terrific insights into how and why formats like Twitter work well.

You can recreate some of that experience by seeing Joanne’s slides as well as the video, and looking at tweets featuring both Joanne and 2gether08.

Joanne defines lifecasting as:

The continual updating of one’s ideas, perspectives and activities through status updates to Facebook, Friendfeed, Twitter or some other social network platform.

and suggests it becomes particularly useful when tags  are introduced to allow searches and summaries. You can see  how that works for a combination of Joanne and 2gether08.

Channel 4’s new £50 million innovation fund 4IP isn’t really open for business until later in the year - but at 2gether08 Jon Gisby, director of new media and technology, provided a “soft launch” which gave insights into how it will operate.
He provided some context of how the world is changing for media companies because of the  Internet, and highlighted how Channel 4 can deliver its public service remit in this new environment.

If you think about what Channel 4 has always done, its always been finding minority ideas and niche interests and bringing them into the mainstream.

That’s kind of how the web works. What we are seeking to do here is …. are there things for the sake of the UK as a whole, and in the context of public innovation, we can highlight, make bigger, accelerate, amplify, by using the power of the Channel 4 brand and our ability to cross promote and bring things into the mainstream.

Jon announced the 4IP think tank that will inform the fund, and invited people to apply. He also said that he hoped to be back for 2gether09, reporting on progress.

• The 4IP website
• Earlier interview with Jon Gisby

Among the many presentations at 2gether08, the one that led to lots of “did you catch that  …” remarks  was JP Rangaswami talking about the Cluetrain Manifesto ten years on. At the event is seemed like a touchstone for our explorations of the relationships of people, technology, commerce and society. Now you can see JP here, introduced by Euan Semple.

JP is Managing Director of BT Data, and widely known for his insightful blogging as Confused of Calcutta. Cluetrain in the late 1990s set out a vision of how the Internet would transform relationships and communications without and within organisations. The Cluetrain website said:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.
These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

At 2gether08 JP suggested that Cluetrain was as much reminding us of what we had lost, as it was talking about the future. It was taking us back to a time before organisation and communication was dominated by command and control, and broadcast mode. It articulated what people were already feeling, and enabled them to say: it’s not just me … and I can get on the Cluetrain too.

JP identified five themes from Cluetrain:

1. people are human beings
2. people work in communities, and community extends beyond the walls of the firm
3. hypelinks subvert hierarchies … and so conversations can go laterally, not just up and down the ladder of control
4. conversations are richer with the new tools available, and firms have less capacity to control their employees and customers
5. people, in that context, have some power, and what is happening has a democratising influence.

JP also offered four themes for future exploration: governance of the Internet; consumers’ ability to aggregate their own information; identify; and intellectual property rights.

You can see the original Cluetrain site, and also read Cluetrain here.

Here are the opening sessions on July 2, which started with  Steve Moore explaining the ideas and experience behind 2gether08, and paying tribute to those who contributed to its very rapid development over eight weeks. Steve said that he wanted the event to be substantially self organising, and developed through creative volunteering. This resulted in about the half the 400  people registered for the event contributing in some way.

Jon Gisby, director of New Media and Technology at Channel 4, welcomed everyone on behalf of the main sponsor. He said Channel 4 were attracted by the scale and ambition of the event, its innovative format, and the way it could contribute to exploration of how we can use technology to make the world a better place.

In the Opening Exchanges Bill Thompson chairs contributions on what are the biggest challenges facing us at the start of the 21st century? with contributions from Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, Umair Haque, Director of Havas Media Lab, and John Naish, author of Enough.

We’ll be posting more videos from 2gether08 over the next week or two.

Technology writer Bill Thompson, a judge in the New Statesman New Media Awards 2008,  has been involved since the awards started 10 years ago. He is well-placed to applaud both the consistent support of  NS publisher Spencer Neal, and that of competitors committed to turning ideas into action.

On this occasion Bill was standing in for Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson, who was called to a Commons vote. Earlier Tom - see interview here - had launched a competition called Show Us a Better Way offering £20,000 in prizes for projects to use government-collected data more innovatively for public services.

Bill said he thought that Tom would ask those assembled to be patient but persistent, recognising that government has habits that are hard to change.

He would also ask people to keep up the pressure on him and his team to open up services, to take more risks and to break down unnecessary barriers.

I think he would ask you to prove him right by building great services and tools on top of what is already out there, by stretching the limits of the possible and even the permissible

To give him ideas and allow him to demonstrate what could be done with existing services, and what more could be done if more data feeds and data sources were opened up.

Then he would ask you all to come back next year and win this competition.

Full recording here of the awards ceremony.

Bill suggests in this interview at 2gether08 that you should be embarrassed if you don’t make the effort to understand new media.

One of the highlights of the first day of 2gether08 was a debated host by Matthew D’Ancona, editor of The Spectator, with guest panellists: political blogger Mick Fealty who writes as Brassneck and Slugger O’Toole; Sunny Hundal, Liberal Conspiracy; Rory Sutherland, Vice Chair Ogilvy Group; and Tom Steinberg, founder of MySociety.

There’s another 20 hours or so of video recorded at 2gether08, and we’ll bring you more soon.

2gether08 hosted the presentation ceremony for the 10th New Statesman New Media Awards and, thanks to the video setup that we had for feeds to other rooms and webcasting, were able to get a top-quality recording.

Here you’ll see New Statesman publisher Spencer Neal making the introductions,  Channel 4’s technology correspondent Ben Cohen making the presentations, and technology writer Bill Thompson standing in for Minister Tom Watson - who had to vote in the Commons. New Statesman website editor Ben Davies wrapped up proceedings with a well-deserved vote of thanks to awards organiser Charlotte Eisenhart.

You can find the full list of winners here on the New Statesman’s site, chosen from this set of finalists.

• One feed is from the theatre, where main presentations are running >
  
• The other is showing video from The Gym >
  

The webacting is organised by Richard Jolly, using Mogulus, where you will find feeds directly here > and here >.