Amplified 09

On the train to London I picked up a copy of the Daily Mail, which told me that "Social websites harm children's brains". On the way home I noticed an article in the londonpaper entitled "A Load Of Twitter" (which strangely doesn't appear on their website). In between I spent five hours talking to people who use social media to achieve positive and very real results in art, media, charity and business.

Amplified 09 was a fascinating, vibrant and productive social media meetup that took place without any publicity or fuss in a week when Twitter and social media is being mocked and attacked by people who don't really get it. Three hundred or so digital craftsmen who have been pulled together by various social media meetups gathered to have unstructured and creative conversations about building online communities around wine, music, film and books, the widening innovation gap between geeks and everyone else, Digital Britain, saving Bletchley Park and installing WiMax aerials into church steeples.

But no matter what the nominal topic, the conversations were all about building the future. Here were a few hundred specialists in new and niche disciplines discovering how their crafts fit together in interesting and unexpected ways. As Amplified organiser Toby Moore is always fond of saying, the opportunities are "in the gaps between silos and traditional structures which are not good at communication and collaboration."

As with all of the social media groups, Amplified is so loosely formed that it's almost impossible to figure out exactly what they are up to without going along to see. It exists online on Twitter, a blog and a simple wiki, where anybody who is interested can contribute conversation topics, start a regional event or help to write the manifesto (which will always be a work in progress, much as the Tuttle meetings are always prototypes for an elusive future meeting format).

The first aim of the manifesto gives us the best clue: "To bring creative and technological talent in social media related industries together in regional centres to discuss issues and projects of interest". There's plenty more than that going on of course, but it's different every time and it depends who's there.

Recently, most technology events will use a hashtag to facilitate aggregation of the generated content – tweets, photos on flickr or Twitpic, videos on Vimeo, Qik, 12seconds and blogging all over the place. Amplified uses the #amp09 hashtag, but goes further. Each discussion has its own hashtag, so #29 is 'Bursting wine bubbles' and #41 is WiMax churches. At the end of each 45-minute session, the 'One Tweet Rule' encourages everyone to explain what they got out of the session in 140 characters (including hashtags). This lets the conversations leave a digital trail that is useful both as a reminder to the participants and an insight to those in the venue and elsewhere who didn't catch a conversation.

Amplified's name comes from the ability of social media to amplify events, ideas and opinions. During the event, Phil Campbell's Rezpondr was used to stream video, messages and photos to the outside world in real time. And now today, less than 24 hours later, blog articles are springing up giving some interesting and varied perspectives on the event.

It's the role of early adopters, geeks, craftsmen and creators to look forward and work to create a truly connected Digital Britain while traditional media sits back and takes pot shots at 'bandwagons' like Twitter that have been usefully connecting like-minded people for years. And with Amplified we have a solid platform from which to figure out how best to use all this new technology now and in the future.