Shine 2008 Day Three

I think I am starting to get the hang of the buidling now and there is now a very relaxed somewhat chaotic feel to the event :)

What seems to be happening now is that embryonic conversations that started on day one are now feeding off each other and I am collecting a bunch of "back burner ideas" such as "could we run free healthcare that has nothing to do with the NHS", "what if Mecca was run a social enterprise", "are all co-ops social enterprise or does it depend on who the members and community are", "can you monetise your content through web-based models", "is the traditional capitalist growth model flawed" (e.g. should you growth or find a good size niche and stay at a sustainable level.

(Pause for lunch)

I have just come out of a really cool session on web 2.0 and had a really interesting and really passionate discussion with a load of people with cool ideas. Hopefully we will carry this on on the blog they are setting up and I will signpost it from here next week. We covered issues like ownership, authenticity, the relationship between business and their customers/users and generated equal amounts of heat and light. I met David Wilcox at the event who is a fellow ENTP and blogger/podcaster/social reporter etc and we had a really great thrash though about whether Web 2.0 is real or whether we are all being "blown off by the technorati" :)

I am now in one of those surreal workshops that I ended up whilst looking for a coffee that is a talkoake session??? So now I am being videod while I am blogging about what the guy with the video camera is talking about. It is all far too self-referential for a sunny sunday afternoon. I love the looks I get when I am blogging in sessions and I do find this much more comfortable on my mac than on my blackberry, although I think I might get into mobile blogging and even maybe Twitter (which does like the crack cocaine of the web 2.0 world).

Overall the 3 days have been really cool and wonderfully anarchic and unstructured (I keep expecting a "free hugs" campaign to break out any any time). There have been some amazing conversations in a very weird building and my head is full of ideas. I think I need to spend some time is a nice quiet introverted space to put some of these thoughts together and trying to move some of these into reality. There is a bit of me that wishes this hadn't been a weekend conference as I think I am going to be pretty knackered tonight and tomorrow and I have got work to do :(

As an aside, I have now decided that Rowena Young does not exist. I think she is like Godot in the Beckett play "Waiting for Godot". Everyone talks about her (and how bright and amazing she is) but I have been to a number of events recently where people say "you've just missed her" or "she is around here somewhere". I wonder if she is some form of social construct or even a mass delusion. I might put "being in the same room as Rowena" on my bucket list (things to do before you die!). I don't think I will post again until a few days after and I have followed up all the wonderful contacts that I have made, put the podcast up and added comments to all the blogs of bloggers that I have met.