Having attended Netexplo recently, a conference dedicated to report the influence of digital on our society, gathering more then 1000 people, I have experienced an interesting usage of interactive applications. Lets be frank, both are for social media geek, and Netexplo is one place where you meet some of them. 

• Wisembly – http://wisembly.com/en/

Wisembly is an application allowing to collect and distribute messages related to a specific topic or event. Messages can be sent through a web interface, Twitter or via sms by anyone. You must obviously first educate the users, but once done, all connected attendees of a conference can react to what they listen or watch in live with their smartphone, tablet and pc. Messages are then anonymously shared on the screens of the conference (wall or main conference display, with moderation or not).

I found this application interesting as it was trying to reduce the gap between the little Twitter community – who is often inclined to create offline streams of reflection or sarcasm, depending on its mood – and the other digitally aware, equipped with smartphones or tablet, but not used to tweet. As demonstration, for Netexplo, 50% of the messages were non-twitter generated messsages, which demonstrate the interest for  such application.The Netexplo staff used Wisembly to raise questions after each presentation or debate. The fact that the message were anonymous had some positive aspects such as avoiding the race to the finest spirit (you know creating the remark everyone will remember, much more than what the conference was about), and the possibility to raise tricky or not politically correct questions without being embarrassed. One of the SNCF representative (the french railway company) admitted that this application was used during their internal management forum, and has slightly changed the tone used by the top management (understand reduce the “langue de bois” or waffle usage).

• Bluenod – http://bluenod.com/

That one is a pure “designed by the twittos, for the twittos” application. Bluenod is analysing the Twitter users generating noise around a specific hashtag. It offers a visualization of the community thanks to blue bubbles. Each user has its own bubble and in case he or she has some correlations with other, will have a line marking it, and thus you can see who is linked with who, and who has the biggest one. The downside of the application is that if you have a big “influencer” entering your area, the visualization may become difficult as it may introduce visual noise on the graphs. Other functions associated to the application are actual tweets followup, ranking of best contributors (well, best or most influenced and talkative ones). Any question on that application ? ask Nicolas Loubet @NicolasLoubet, the “bluenod activist”.

Both applications are nice (french) tools to create interactions, and stream the digital life happening beside the actual talks of the conference – which is sometimes soooo helpful to complete the talks.