This time last year, I was involved in my first experiment to ‘amplify’ an event.

Of course, we didn’t call it that then - Amplified was still a very much at the planning stages, and I don’t think it had a name, but a group of us from Tuttle and Creative Coffee who were already involved with the festival put together a team to use social media tools to capture as much of it as we could.

Nokia kindly supplied us with the hardware we needed - a bevvy of Qik-enabled smart-phones that allowed us to stream video live to the web, to post to twitter, to take photos and upload them to flickr, and in the case of Mike Radcliffe AKA ArtBizness, to film a mini documentary series about camping at a festival with a new-born baby.

We were all fairly green with the technology - Christian Payne - Documentally - was to a large part our inspiration in how to do video reportage with a camera-phone, but we each found our own tone, and took to the task of getting the best of what was going captured. I gathered a few interviews that I’m really proud of - this one with Frank Schaeffer of the Huffington Post, this one with Michael Franti and…

The digital footprint of our social media output was pretty huge, all of it without any official promotion by the festival who, like most big organisations, didn’t really get the value in this kind of decentralised first-person reportage and its place in facilitating conversations around the event. At least, not until after the festival

This year we’re going back, only with the accumulated widsom and error of the last year, with a strategy for amplification, with a much greater degree of awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of the various tools, and of course a whole bunch of new technology, not least of all the wonderful Audioboo app for iPhone, allowing us to capture high-quality audio interviews. If you want to follow what’s going on, the festival twitter stream is @greenbelt, the hashtag on twitter will be #GB09 and on flickr/blogs etc. it’ll be #greenbelt09. Keep an eye on the front page of the website over the festival weekend, for the filtered best of what we come up with!