Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference took place in London on Tuesday, it was sub-titled "Exploring the State of Now", based around Twitter. It was different to any other conference I have attended in both format and in attendees. There were over 50 speakers in some 35 sessions, they ran sequentially, so in theory it was possible to hear all of them. The attendees seemed to be a mix of marketing peoples, musicians, geeks, charities, police and educators.
I missed the morning session as I was already committed to a meeting in Reading, and so I didn't get to hear Stephen Fry or Andrew Keen which I'm sure would have provided entertainment and/or provocation. In the afternoon there were a couple of sessions I found particularly interesting:

• Dean Landsman and Dean Meyers on Digital Presence. The talk touched on issues of reputation which was in harmony with our thinking on the This is Me project. I was a little distracted by one of the Dean's talking about the Romans in Britain in the 12th Century, surely they had gone home by then?
• Josie Fraser on the The Art and Science of the ReTweet. Josie introduced a bit of a social science perspective, peppered with some made-up statistics about how we use ReTweeting.

I was part of a panel who were addressing education. The panel was chaired by Dave White,  the other panelists were: Sue Black, Drew Buddie (aka Digital Maverick) and James Clay. We had planned a set of questions that would cause discussion between ourselves, but during the day it appeared that there was a need to involve the audience more, so we decided to change from our prepared material, which meant I didn't have time to talk about some of the great positives I know of (getting jobs, saving degrees etc), but I think it made the panel more memorable. We talked about access to twitter, James cited how many schools, FE colleges,HEIs blocked Twitter (99.999 - 60%); impact on Digital Identity, got in a plug for This is Me; curriculum, personalisation of education; Twitter in schools, in Grantham 6 yearolds use Twitter; and all too soon our time was up. It was a great group to be on a panel with, and I would love to work with these guys again.
I missed some of the next sessions, which was a shame because they looked interesting topics, by talking to some very interesting people. But good to make contacts.
All in all it was a very interesting events, another time I would try to get to hear more of the presentations and to get more time to chat with interesting people. The only downside was the lack of free high quality wireless, the mobile providers certainly didn't have the bandwidth, my 3 dongle was giving a treacle-like service, and others seemed to have the same sort of difficulties.
Thanks to Jeff Pulver for realising his vision of his event.