Posted by Kevin Anderson

On Thursday at XTech, I took matters into my own hands. Suw and I always travel with an Airport Express so that we can share hotel broadband. In this instance, we used her Airport Express to share the hotel’s broadband with our fellow conference participants. I posted on the Guardian Technology blog about several of the talks.

The full roundup:

• The Ubiquious web and climate change
• Rabbits and pipelines
• Digital rights and Democracy
• Widgets and Joost

That’s all of the posting that I managed. Much, much more, well all of it is here at PlantXTech. I really wanted to blog the session about Quakr, ” a project to build a 3-dimensional world from user contributed photos”.

One thing that I really enjoyed was talking in between sessions about how the web really can be used to foster a rich, nuanced discussion about pressing issues. There is a lot of work to do with identity, community building and context. Rob McKinnon’s talk about fostering democratic participation was really thought provoking. I also really enjoyed chatting with AOLs Edwin Aoki about fostering discussions, especially Trans-Atlantic discussion.

I have to admit to a little frustration with media in the US (mostly Fox) and in UK for amplifying the ill will between Americans and Brits. Is there any way to get past this surface noise and get people to talk to each other? How do you structure the online discussion and online spaces to make this happen? More on that later. Lots of thoughts forming along those lines. And I’ll have to post some thoughts from my talk about a real revolution in news and community created content (full paper).

I had planned on doing some video blogging, but instead I stuck to a few text posts. Besides, most of the speakers and conference goers were a little camera shy. But I did manage to catch Ian Forrester with BBC Backstage for a quick question on what got him most excited at the conference:

technorati tags:XTech, XTech2007, Media 2.0, IanForrester, community