Conference tweets left the chair and speakers lagging behind

And there was a great mix of speakers - from Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon, who sees the future in cloud computing, to Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, who has brought the internet to children in remote villages in India.

Meanwhile, Gerry Jackson, founder of SW Radio Africa, spoke about how the independent Zimbabwe radio station is fighting for democracy, and Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post, gave a keynote speech on "Society, humanity, technology and the web".

She said "traditional" media suffer from attention deficit disorder, in that they want to move on to new content and new stories at too fast a pace, while "new" media suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. She claimed the greatest contribution the latter can make to changing the world is an obsessive interest in details that would be brushed aside by media that are editorially limited by space and time.

Huffington addressed those who accept disruptive innovation in business, as well as those who don't, by quoting 2,500-year-old Greek philosopher Heraclitus to dismiss people who try to revive a past that no longer exists. "You can't step into the same river twice," she explained.

There was a new-media feel to the second keynote session as well, with the Tweets of delegates posted up behind the speakers. This felt experimental. The subject of the panel was "Politics, democracy and public life: mobilising democracy, streamlining government and realising political power through the internet".

The issue here was whether the Twitterfall behind the speakers added or detracted from the debate. The speakers, Thomas Gensemer of Blue State Digital, who worked on the Obama election campaign, Adam Afriyie MP, shadow minister for science and innovation, and Tom Watson MP, former minister for transformation, were excellent. However, while the audience could see the Tweets, the speakers and chair could not, as the screen was behind them.

This meant comments posted weren't answered and, at some points, the Twittering overtook the debate. This hit a low point for me when the audience began giggling like schoolchildren because someone, presumably a bit bored, commented "Doesn't Tom Gensemer look like Gary Oldman?", shortly to be trumped by "Doesn't Tom Watson look like Frank Carson?".

But some Twitterers were extremely relevant. My advice would be to make sure the speakers can see the Tweets too and respond, or don't put them up.