As I mentioned before, I’ll be doing a bit of writing on the Beyond Broadcast blog as I’m here in Boston attending the Open Media Summit. I’ll try to keep up on it here as well and post some more random thoughts and comments, and whatever doesn’t end up on the official blog. I’m also recording most of the panels and presentations and will have a podcasting stream of that available soon.

What strikes me so far here is the adoption, as one would expect, of the participation “model” if it could be called that, the encouragement of audience interaction. We’ve been asked to tag all of our photos and posts, on flickr and del.icio.us respectively, with the tag beyondbroadcast, which, only two hours into the conference, is already yeilding tremendous results. Questions are being posted and voted on and then posed to the speakers. There is a live stream of the presentations and the conference is being rebroadcast, to an eerily similar effect, in the online gaming environment, Second Life. In good conscience, and, again, in keeping with the sentiment which speaker James Boyle announced – and I believe we all agree with – we don’t really know where all of this participatory media is going to lead us yet and it is still relatively untapped. That being said, there aren’t guidelines here so much as suggestions. An IRC chat opened up at the last minute and was advertized on the questions posting. Hopefully more will emerge. Me, I’m just infinitely impressed by the personal electrical outlets on every arm rest in the “Ames Courtroom” where the panels are taking place. That means there will be a lot more blogging to come.

Check out more blog coverage on the Beyond Broadcast Conference