The active dismissive chatter of the chat rooms primarily stayed in the background. But there were a few moments when the traffic on the wireless networks burst into visible words within the room. During some of the talks, enterprising hackers set up an LED display in the seats - the "HeckleBot." Anyone in the IRC channel could send a message to the scrolling blinking lights on the other side of the room. "Joi is not wearing pants!" came up during one panel. According to digital insurrectionist and indyvoter.org co-founder Marc Powell "One of the main points of IRC is to IRC in a way that makes other people on the channel totally lose it - laughing out loud or busting up or whatever. Having a hecklebot digital sign bridges the digital divide." With attention split between laptops with email and chat, a potentially ringing phone, panelists talking, and a scrolling LED running comedy commentary on the proceedings, it was hard to know who was laughing at what between six different stimuli streams.

One nice thing about hanging out online is that the notes and transcripts can be saved. There's a wiki page hosted by the conference that has a growing list of links to people's notes from the show. The Hydra links, it is interesting to note, are from an application called "SubEthaEdit" - a tool for collective simultaineous note-taking online. Macintosh only; a tool that really thrives in a wireless-saturated conference! This is definitely the upside of plentiful bandwidth - the productive backchannel.