Mark Little opens the summit. Alongside, his "Mastermind" chairs await their expert occupants

Everyone will have their own view, but for me one of the keys to this event was that it somehow managed to keep its feet on the ground. Just when it threatened to spin off into the realms of new-media-head group-think, some bright spark would chip in to say: “hang on a minute…” The warmest applause of the day came for the speaker who said ” it ain’t necessarily so”, albeit without questioning the fact that new media matter deeply.  It’s just that they are NOT the beginning and the end, life without end, amen.

Speaking personally, I had a great day. I twittered like a maniac, spreading the bon mots of my fellow panelists. (A selection of other twitterers here.) Maybe this was good – I was on the constant alert for some pithy soundbite (therefore attentive) – but maybe it was bad – I felt strangely guilty when some last-minute questioner (and self-confessed social media innocent) questioned whether “all these people twittering haven’t somehow lost contact with reality – just being where they are…”. I remain ambivalent. Instinctively, I realized I was closer to this heretic ( I wanted to tell him that I go days without twittering, honest!) than to others who said they felt somehow incomplete if they weren’t online, people who said, without visible irony, that they were REALLY in more than one place at the same time and a speaker who quoted, straight-faced I think, the youth-savant Charlieissocoollike to the effect that it was weird that anyone might consider the online and offline worlds as two separate things. Charlieissocoollike, sorry, but you need to meet some actual, like, people, or take a holiday in a place without wifi or even GSM reception. (Yes, they exist.)

Look, I don’t want to harp on, but like-minded individuals tend to form self-referential groups and, at times, get a little overexcited. New media are fab, really, but they are not going to solve the world’s problems, even if I am open to the idea that they might radically change the world.  The internet itself changed the world, no question, but when push comes to shove we’ve still got to wash our socks, right?

We should enjoy this time, make the most of the amazing possibilities we are lucky enough to have, but without forgetting that the internet is there for us, not we for it.

Annoyingly, the hero of the web summit was Ben Hammersley. He is the editor of Wired magazine (UK), therefore, as he himself had it, “supposedly the most digital person on the planet”. I say “annoyingly” because, well, Ben Hammersley was annoying. He had his act down to a fine art: being the uber-digital digital iconoclast. He made abundant fun of web-heads, more or less telling them to get a life, stop obsessing over their aggregated twitter feeds, interactive blogs and RSS news channels and go down the pub and TALK TO SOMEBODY. Thing is, just when you were getting geared up to totally have it in for this guy for, erm, fouling his own doorstep, he went all dopey and said something like this was the “golden age of information, and that he couldn’t think of a single area of life where things had ever objectively been better. So the smart-arse iconoclasm diffused by a dose of rampant. doe-eyed idealism! Spot on. And deeply annoying of course. I imagine, should he read this, that he will be deeply gratified. As he should be, because he is right: we should enjoy this time, make the most of the amazing possibilities we are lucky enough to have, but without forgetting that the internet is there for us, not we for it.

But don’t let me give the impression that this was all some philosophical debate about the internet: it was mostly about learning how social media can work for you. The format of the day was the panel discussion, led by the amazingly professional RTE newsman Mark Little, of sonorous voice and easy manner (it was a joy and a fascination to see him in action), whereby groups of “experts“, including the undersigned, were encouraged to share their experiences and wisdom. There was some guff about “seeding 150 ideas during the day”. I wasn’t counting, but there was indeed plenty to chew on, most of which was twittered to the wider world in real time.

For me, one very small moment said a lot about how this social web thing is changing the way information circulates. The twittering brigade were marking their tweets with the hash tag “#dws” (Dublin web summit). For those who daren’t ask (like me a few months ago), that means that you mark your short messages with a label (#dws) which allows users of Twitter to search for and view all the tweets thus marked and therefore in practice follow everything on that subject). Anyway, at one point, some guy sitting in Canada tweets a question along the lines of: “hey guys, what’s #dws, it sounds really interesting?”. I tweeted a quick response enlightening him and received his thanks.

So there was a guy in Canada – one of many, it seems – following the summit, absorbing the pearls of wisdom and basically, I suppose, being in two places at once. Amazing, isn’t it? But maybe he should have been down the pub instead…