In September I am heading to Lisbon [nice!] to give a talk to the TERENA-PR group about the ideas behind the ‘amplified conference’.

This idea has been getting some traction recently in and around JISC (though it has been a mainstay of the growing number of Web 2.0 related events for a couple of years) and I have pinched the term from Lorcan Dempsey from a post on his blog that was referring to the JISC Digitisation Conference where we implemented alot of the ideas.

We have also recently made attempts to extend the JISC Conference and the Next Generation Environments conference using live (or near as!) blogging and other online tools.

The basic idea is making use if tools like blogs, wikis, photo sharing etc to build a community around an event prior, during and post and event.

As many of these tools are free and use elements like tagging and RSS it is possible to aggregate then using tools like Yahoo Pipes (as ALT are doing for this years conference) and then present an overview of the event beyond the official point-of-view.

Amongst the tools that have been proven to be popular for the extended audience are:

• live blogging from sessions
• podcasts with the speakers [and audience]
• slidecasts
• using agreed tags to aggregate multiple RSS feeds
• wikis to enable networking and collaboration
• streaming of sessions

All of these have been used to some extent in the wider community recently (at the Institutional web managers workshop live streams of the keynotes was offered)  but I think its only when a number of the tools are used together that you really ‘amplify’..

On a related note a few years ago various people and organisations were toying with the idea of a FE/HE combined events calendar.  This never really happened but the need for something that prevents clashes and allows people to plan their attendance is still valid and I wonder if we shouldn’t be encouraging more use of something like Upcoming.org – its owned by Yahoo so its not going away anytime soon and would be a easy solution to an ongoing issue.

Back to our regular programming – at the 2008 JISC Conference I want to explore these opportunities even further – including adding video to the mix.  I am especially interested in uStream.tv as it seems this might offer a lightweight solution to live (and recorded) video streaming.

Believe it or not I have more thoughts on this topic and will be back to this with another post soon…