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Our coverage of Futuresonic is completed with a post from the eyes of 3 Â鶹Éç R&D engineer's.

Last week the Contact theatre in manchester played host to the as part of 2009, an urban festival of art, music and ideas. Stowe Boyd's radical explored the way the web is changing social interaction, observing a progression from mainstream media to decentralised participative networks and suggesting that a new form a tribalism may arise.

The Digital Economy panel gave a series of short presentations exploring the relationship between user experience and bandwidth, with a particular focus on the rise of gaming technologies. Increasing bandwidth (the 'fat pipe') and accelerating convergence lead to a bright future for creative producers including games companies. As well as the overall convergence of digital platforms, Enda Carey discussed how his organisation is supporting development of creative media industries in England's North West. Funding and support for individuals and small businesses are at the heart of NW V&M's business, including an active involvement in preparing for the arrival of MediaCity.

The Â鶹Éç's own gave an excellent talk on the use of games for good. The power of engagement that games yield makes them an excellent mechanism for delivering factual and educational content as well as entertainment. Philip shared the challenge of creating a shift in the perception of games; it is accepted that television can tackle contentious issues through dramatisation but games are often seen to trivialise their subject matter, despite the fact that some efforts produce more accurate depictions than film could ever achieve. Both Philip and Toby Barnes of made it clear how important games are going forward. They both believe that games are valuable learning tools as well as being a source of entertainment and expression, and provided a wide-ranging list of that demonstrate the current trends in game development as technology progresses. Overall the panel made it clear that the game industry is an important aspect of the future , and provided plenty of food for thought to any traditional media stalwarts in attendance.

The Identity and Trust stream focussed on the responsibility of large social networks to nurture the trust of their users, particularly children, giving them confidence in their identity and relationships. This seems to contrast with the desire to utilise the powerful marketing capabilities made possible by the wealth of personal data generated by users. Rachel O'Connell of is working to ensure that children can use emerging technologies safely, with applications that can educate and empower them. She discussed the challenges they are facing and overcoming using the example of ubiquitous access to support networks such as the Samaritans through social networking sites. The danger seemed to me to be finding the line between these altruistic aims and the marketing power that Bebo offers to commercial clients. There's always a danger of young people's trust being abused, or their ownership of data undermined, and we must tread carefully.

Ewan McIntosh of the gave an inspiring presentation entitled, "The Death of Industrial Education" which was much clearer on the issue of trust. He suggested that in some networks trust should be upheld through , whereas in others, personal data should be gathered transparently and minimally with an incentive to provide information. McIntosh attacked the current state of education, suggesting it is a throwback to the industrial revolution where children were seen as a captive audience to be 'taught at'. He explained how social networks form part of a more suitable environment in which education can flourish.

Tristan Thielmann presented what was billed to be 'a madcap, humourous response' to Drew Hemment's 2006 claim that new thinking in locative media will help resolve the climate change crisis. Perhaps the fact that this is not my field prevented my from entirely grasping his arguments, but his final point that you shouldn't trust data unless you yourself collected it seems like a very romantic ideal that would be impractical for most to follow.

Friday afternoon looked to be better than the morning, with the semantic web up for discussion. Although this is something that people have been talking about for a quite some time, the theatre there did seem to have quite a palpable buzz around what Tom Ilube described as a tide-like phenomenon; slow, but unstoppable. The explanation of the semantic web as the transition from documents to data seemed clear enough, but following the twitter feed of the event showed that there was a fair bit of uncertainty of what the semantic web actually means on a practical level. Later, the Â鶹Éç's own Simon Cross and Ben Smith gave an interesting insight into what bbc.co.uk might want to do with data rather than documents. The development of areas such as /music and the /programmes ontology highlights the Â鶹Éç's increasing commitment to opnenness and collaboration, just one example being the use of identifiers for /music rather than our own proprietary IDs. As Simon and Ben put it, when you link your data to other open data sources, amazing things happen.

One of the most enjoyable sessions was talk on data visualisation. He proves that great swathes of seemingly trivial data can not only be made understandable, but also beautiful. From his well-known work on visualising flight paths to some fantastic work on the SMS traffic on Dutch mobile networks, his work is well worth a look. He has also produced some interesting art - both visual and musical - based around soliciting the contributions of thousands of individuals via Amazon's . Very social indeed.

Overall a great few days. Next year, Futuresonic returns as , and the Â鶹Éç will doubtless be there too.

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