danah boyd just finished her iSight-mediated presentation and it was excellent! Everything just worked – we simply used iChat with iSights, and she sent me Powerpoint slides that we showed on a different screen. We got a chatroom going too but people didn’t get the hang of that till right at the end – lots of good questions when it was nearly too late.

It worked very well. danah’s so lively and engaging that she seemed more present than many unmediated conference presenters I’ve seen. Of course there are things that could have been even better. We had to mute us so as to avoid echos, which must have made things very strange for danah – she had to speak with no audience feedback except for a small, pixellated video image of the room. Hooking up better microphones would have been cool – and teaching people to use the chat beforehand would have been good. But all in all it went wonderfully and I’d happily do it again. Look, danah’s posted about it too.

We also have a videoblog of the conference up now, beautifully done by Jon. We’re not streaming presentations, but they’re posted afterwards, so you can watch complete videos of the presentations as well as short videos of conference delegates eating, chatting, relaxing and hanging out. The wiki‘s growing, and we got a chat site going for (unlogged) backchannel and frontchannel.