My brain is still spinning from ETech, where we were eating our own dog food all week trying out social software during the show. Though the #etcon irc channel was fascinating (my favorite use: Rael finding people on the conference floor by asking people on the irc channel to look for them), that was just a magnification of the irc effects we saw last year. The winner of the New Kid on the Block award was Hydra, the "7 brains are smarter than one" group text editor.

Hydra was designed for programmer collaboration but instantly pressed into use as a group annotation tool for talks, in a pattern Carl Beeth likes to an IM Wiki. There were lots of session notes created as Hydra documents, including one for Eric Bonabeau's talk on ants as a model for decentralized problem solving, written jointly by between 7 and 10 people (Kottke's estimate). Tom Coates also posted an image of the doc with Hydra formatting intact. (Many users said they wish the resulting doc could be saved with color-coding intact as well as in plain text.)

There was also a Hydra doc for Matt Jones and James Cronin's Social Software and Social Capital talk about the BBC's use of social software (impeccably annotated by the inestimable Tom Coates, who posted an earlier review of Hydra.)

Notable for its "Anything you can do, I can do meta" nature was the Hydra doc on David Weinberger's "What Groups Will Be" talk, which includes the group inventing a template for Hydra docs as group note-taking tools during the session, as well as a lot of good feature requests at the end. And then there were Richard Gayle's notes on what happens when Hydra hits a wall with too many users logged in at once.

As an aside, the sharing of Hydra docs by people in the same room, mostly via Rendezvous, all points to the important shift in ubiquity brought about by WiFi. Not just "You can get to the internet everywhere" ubiquity, but "Whoever you are with, you can be online and offline with them at the same time" ubiquity.

UPDATE: Robert Kaye has some interesting notes on Hydra use, including one of my personal obsessions, problems with scale.