So, Thinking Digital is over for another year…

What an event. Herb, Marissa and the whole Codeworks team have again created a stunning event. Steve has always said he loves this event. I agree 100%. Very few events actually do what they say except this – Think Digital. But there are SO many diverse topics that get covered it can make your head spin!

Highlights today:

David Siegel, talking about the semantic web in a complexity, yet simoucuty that made it JUST MAKE SENSE. I hope we can get the slides from his talk because it really did make what is inevitably going to very quickly become mainstream (and therefore clouded by pseudo-intellectuals) appear a very simple way to add context to allow machines to understand what we do.

Mary Ann de Lares Norris presented G-speak to a stunned audience. G-speak to the now initiated is the cool technology that made Tom Cruise look cool in Minority Report.

The best thing about this technology is that it was actually based on something that existed at the time the film was being produced (how many years ago was THAT?). Mary Ann reckons this kind of tech will be in our homes within 5 years – much less if I have my way!

Jer Thorpe is one of the editors of wired uk magazine and the chap responsible for Inforporn (stunning visualisations of data a la Jonathan Harris). The video below, gives you some idea, but DO have a look at Jer’s blog and flickr account for more goodies!

Tom Scott, Geek Comedian told a fab story about a Chat-Roulette-style flash-mob debacle. A taster of some of Tom’s mad stuff can be found here:

One of the highlights of the day was Ralf Herbrich of Microsoft’s Fuselabs who presented a really exciting learning engine for Twitter (image nicked from Clayton).

Pick a lens (Twitter stream of mainstream topics life sport, technology for example) and teach the system with a few clicks what tweets you like or dislike. In short, the system then learns this and ensures it only presents you with tweets of a similar nature. I’m pretty sure i;m not doing it justice, but I hope there is more of this kind of stuff to come out of MS as this ALWAYS helps to build a reputation of innovation which then filters down into other products. Steve does it slightly better justice than I could!

All-in-all, yet again, Thinking Digital delivered some amazing stuff and even though Gabba played only a miniscule part in it, just being here was reward enough.