At Etcon. Three tracks of talks (I was watching Tom Coates: more later). Via Wifi/Rendevous, was able to use Hydra to see who is taking notes of other talks in other rooms.

There are a couple of other pieces of software available to have a social discussion online while in the conference spaces (confab, intro, and an IRC channel to name a few) but the unintended consquences of Hydra in a wifi’d-conference situation compared to them is that you can tell who’s actually listening to the person on stage – and their level of investment in listening/annotating, rather than who’s talking, snarking and joking with each other (not to say this is a bad thing.)

Stephen Johnson wrote about how a parallel wifi-world can suck the laughter out of the real-world discussion. I’m starting to think that a “too-parallel”/non-real-world meshed communications environment can suck too much of the attention out of a room too. I’ve only used Confab, so I can’t talk about the experience of using Intro, and it is enmeshed with the real-world, but it’s bound tightly to the hotel map, to the geography of the space, rather than to the subject-matter of what’s being discussed in the space.

The Hydra model points to an “augmented-reality” conference experience, where the task-oriented nature of the tool keeps those it gathers together immersed in the real-world.