There was a clear view of what digital exclusion is from the speakers. And it’s a huge issue: massive numbers of people are not getting the benefits of computers and web access. I was particularly troubled by the evidence of how school children without computers and web access at home are seriously disadvantaged. So much learning and so many educational resources are available online now that they are losing out to an enormous degree. Lots of digitally excluded families are single parent families too. But, equally, digital exclusion can also mean geographical exclusion because there are no pipes and be related to disability and age.

Tom Watson MP was very clear regarding political structures (and also rather good fun as usual): government needs to be more joined up and he’s rightly enthusiastic about the work of Martha Lane-Fox as the new digital champion. He was candid on the level of understanding of new media, web issues and digital exclusion in government: “It’s pretty bad.”

But I wonder whether we came any closer to understanding why it matters or why we should care more. Is digital inclusion a human right as the French recently have decreed or is it just a Good Thing, or is the economic importance dominant? Digital inclusion also brings better educational and employment opportunities. Graham Walker, Director of Strategy for the Office of the Digital Champion asked the question: why should we care about digital exclusion? And perhaps because all of us there knew it was important, we didn’t more adequately answer that question. But it seems we need to.

My other big question regards what exactly has been achieved when not insignificant sums have been spent and, perhaps more keenly, are the right people doling out the cash? It seems to me that broadband access has surged from nil in 1997 to 65% today had little to do with government. Moreover, I didn’t get a really tangible sense of what could be achieved quickly and efficiently.

I guess the nature of the event was always going to favour a top down philosophy and examining what can be done by government. The essential approach of the panel was: let’s define the issue, let’s get the issue on the agenda of government more fully and let’s get loads of money to tackle it. And UK Online Centres has been evidently successful and the Home Access plan is welcome: it’s a great scheme to give families with school age kids computers and internet access at home.

But as the £300m Home Access budget was mentioned I couldn’t help feel some disquiet at Mark Walker of SCIP’s cheerful admission that one of his projects had spent £180k in a year and achieved very little.

I very strongly believe that business has a critical role to play here. For me chirpy Graham Walker’s sceptical bargepole view that keeps business distant is simplistic not least because it views business predominantly as a budget holders to be tapped. Needless to say, he is fearful that business would get involved merely as a PR stunt and that’s fair enough. But business involvement can be not only but also. In particular, there are people in business, people like Martha lane-Fox, who could be useful. Expertise, not just cash.

We need to be clearer on why we should be passionate about tackling digital exclusion and more honest about how it’s damaging society and the economy. Of course, on so many levels, we’ve only just begun but it seems to me that government doesn’t understand the issue and yet we’re looking to them to solve it. Great swathes of expertise and success, from business in particular, remains untapped.

And here are some of the other questions that sprang to mind:

- Should we compel very profitable, usually international companies such as eBay/PayPal/Skype, Google, Yahoo and the rest to shoulder some of the burden of tackling the problem? The money they make goes straight to California and Leichtenstein and the like. Should they be ponying more up?

- The pipes issue can be solved: just needs cash. Right?

- The BBC surely has a non-self serving role in doing more here? They get such a chunk of cash, after all, and compete with private business online. Do they need a specific role here that stretches beyond catering to people who are already online? One thing that occurred to me was: should the digitally excluded be exempted from the Licence Fee or perhaps get a voucher to the value of the Licence Fee to spend on getting included? (And yes, I know, a half-baked and tricky idea but it sprang to mind!)

- Should we accept that there will always be some people who aren’t online, like we seemingly tolerate the fact that some people are can’t read and write proficiently?

- Might clever, lean and ethical local businesses and organisations be better than govt, third sector and agencies at spending the money that becomes available?

- Where do schools fit in with this problem? And libraries?

- What is going to happen if the Conservatives win the next general election?

How 31 Year Olds Consume Media
By Dan Wilson (31 years and 8 months)

Radio
We listen to the radio a lot and increasingly we’ve started enjoying Wake up to Wogan. Terry’s dry wit is a great start to the day. Moving Jo Whiley to the weekends seems like a shame. Singles we bought in our teens are increasingly being billed as oldies. We miss John Peel.

Television
We watch much more television than we confess to and constantly complain that TV isn’t as good as it used to be. Nowadays it’s all cooking, antiques and property shows. Programmes about making money from buying and selling houses have become less satisfactory since we fell into negative equity. iPlayer means we can catch up with Celebrity Masterchef at our convenience. Interactive TV means things like calling Noel Edmonds on Swapshop, writing to Jim’ll Fix it and shouting at the panel on Question Time.

Newspapers
You can’t beat a sunday morning with a coffee and the quality papers. You can’t do that on a Nintendo! Otherwise, Metro or other freesheets that you pick up on the way to work.

Music
We’re angry about music because the industry has fleeced us time and time again. We’ve bought music on vinyl, tape, CD and downloaded it too. And yet Paul Mcartney still hasn’t stopped complaining about how we’re ripping him off. We have no idea what DRM is but we suspect it’s a pretty good university second only to Oxford and Cambridge.

Devices
We remember when having a telephone meant that mum used her special phone voice and said our own telephone number when she picked up the receiver. Calling after 6pm was cheaper and calling abroad was prohibitively expensive. We used to phone up other people’s houses and just hope they were in. Yes, really.

We’ve had decent mobiles for a decade and more. Our first fone was seriously cool and seriously expensive. Every handset since has been smaller, cheaper and more reliable. This has taught us a lot about life. We’re still teaching our parents how to text. Blackberrys are great because you can check your work email on the way home. Apple iPhones are great because you can check your work email on the way home and feel superior to someone who’s still using a Blackberry.

Internet
31 years olds are adept at using the internet. Many people look at pornography.

Friends Reunited introduced us to social media and reconnected us with everyone we ever lost touch with from school. We spent a decade regretting our early enthusiasm but remain satisfied with the knowledge that the school cool kid who once taunted us now works in Tescos and has three kids by three different partners (the oldest child is 12!). We deserted Friends Reunited when our mum and teachers joined but there’s still someone we had a crush on in year 9 (just after it stopped being the fifth form) that we keep an eye out for. Just in case.

MySpace is a mystery. It looks like a teenage bedroom wall covered in posters and magazine cuttings. We hate it because the Guardian says it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch. We know it’s very important for new bands (such as The Arctic Monkeys) hoping to make the charts but since they cancelled Top of the Pops we don’t see much point in the charts. We understand that MySpace is all to do with downloads. Downloads are just like singles. But free. Downloads killed Woolworths. Pick and Mix was better than MySpace.

Facebook is for baby photos, wedding photos and party photos. People who put up baby photos get most of their adult interaction via Facebook. Women who put up wedding photos look forward to the day when they can put up baby photos of their own. Married men are jealous of their single mates going to the pub a great deal more than they do. People who post party photos keep a close eye on the relationship status and are keenly aware that their profile picture makes them look better than in real life. Everyone plays a lot of Scrabble.

Twitter is great. It takes us moments to lie about what we’ve been doing. We seem more interesting, erudite and connected on Twitter than we really are in real life. A train delay is a great tweet and everyone wants to know about a trip to a farmers’ market. Here’s hoping no one asks us out for a mountain bike ride after last weekend’s tweets. We made it up.

Gaming
Monopoly, Cluedo and Scrabble at Christmas. Will consider getting a Wii when Chucky Egg and Pong are available.

Mathew Robson
We have no idea why a lad who should be wanking, drinking Merrydown cider in a graveyard and listening to Radiohead is writing plausible memos for an evil merchant bank. At his age we hated Thatcher and thought that a Labour government would make everything better. We did our work experience at the local B&Q. We still listen to the Levellers when we’ve drunk too much carbon-neutral wine from artisan vineyards in Dorset.

Pew Internet provide this fascinating graph charting how various activities have changed online over the past few years. Rather boringly, I think the most interesting perspective is simply that people are using the net more and accessing email. But you may well disagree.

One of my usual rants regards how irritatingly inward looking net folk are. I totally agree with Blackbeard Blog's idea that plenty of offline experiences can inform online activity, especially when you're a community manager. One of my favourite sources of community wisdom is a builder.

If someone is threatening to kill themselves in your forum, you should send them an email. That's the advice of this piece from Managing Communities called "Dealing with Suicide On Your Online Community or Forums: How You Can Help and Protect Everyone". This article should have been called: "Washing your hands of all responsibility and pleasing your legal director when faced with suicide." It's practical, considered, cold and inhuman. If I had followed this advice in the past, I'd still be eating myself up about not going with my gut. I'd also have a dead community member haunting me.

I like this diagram from Next Engine, even if it doesn't explain everything and is grandly described as How Communities Really Behave. But the sentiment is right... you're not in control.

Teens don't like Twitter. And that's a very useful reminder that when it comes to online communities it can be a case of horses for courses. Matthew Robson, the 15 year old intern at Morgan Stanley provided interesting reading. But I wouldn't base a business strategy on his note.

I’ve been doing my bit for transparency and democracy in the last day or so, using the Guardian's crowdsourcing tool to scour the thousands of documents related to MP expenses.

I’ve reviewed just over 300 pages. It's taken me a fair few hours. Here are a few reflections.

• Great swathes of documents are tedious and I’m more keenly appreciative of what the Telegraph achieved when they reviewed the documents. Regarding the expenses themselves, there’s a lot of stationery. Outrageous amounts of stationery.
• There’s a lot of blacking out, but for the most part, the nature and amount of the documents is clear. Only a few are totally meaningless with some of the information redacted.
• Claiming for food (often up to £400 monthly max permitted) without receipts isn’t rare and an extraordinary perk. But more seriously, monthly claims for £250 petty cash without paperwork seem commonplace. For perspective, Jobseeker’s Allowance is £64.30 a week.
• I found a few fun claims: £860 sofabed, £200 deckchairs and for reasons unknown an XL hi -vis jacket for a tenner. Safety first.

On a more geeky bent, and whilst totally supporting the Guardian’s brilliant initiative, the tool needs some tweaking. Of course, it’s been launched with remarkable speed but things like choosing the date are terribly cumbersome. Also, with such a volume of documents, I would appreciate a quicker way of flagging the numerous boring and uninteresting pages. Classifying a document adequately as a claim form coversheet of no interest takes 3 clicks. That’s two too many.
I agree with much of what That Canadian Girl and Paul Bradshaw have written but this is only day two and we’re something like 10% through the task in hand. The gauges showing how many, and what percentage, of documents have been reviewed in total and by MP are fun.  It’s a very engaging way of visualising progress and certainly spurred me on to complete certain sets of documents.

But if I’m going to do 300 more documents I need a bit of loving. I’d welcome a chance to communicate with other reviewers to share best practice (that could be a forum or a wiki) because I have passed over a fair few documents because I don’t really know what to do with them. There’s perhaps also scope for a tool to flag tricky pages to others for peer review.

Also, let’s see some sort of league table of reviewers. Let’s unleash the competitive streak: I am desperate to know whether I’m a low-level reviewer or a whizz. It would be nice too if the Guardian could keep us reviewers up to date with an email letting us know how it’s going. I don’t have a meaningful sense of what the Guardian is going to do with the info and if I had a better notion I might be more active.

Day one of this crowdsourcing experiment was getting it started and keeping the wheels on and this morning thousands of more documents have been made available. But even with many hands making light work, this is going to take some time and I look forward to the Guardian honing and improving the way they’re engaging, recognising and communicating with the crowd who is making this all possible.

Imagine this: people make social judgements about the emails they receive. It's an obvious observation with real importance for marketers and worth reading.

This article examines the mistakes that many business owners make when they embark on building a new website. It's good food for thought.

I found this Mashable article about whether your company should have a social media strategy absorbing.

This Next Web article makes sensible points about choosing a good domain name.

According to Hitwise, online retailers are getting more traffic from social networks than paid search. Useful reading but I'm unsure whether the numbers are simply just good PR rather than usual business advice.

An old favourite. Do you remember what your and other websites looked like way back when? See how far you've come. I adore the Wayback Machine.

So when I discovered Councillor Kitcat was on Twitter, I obviously followed him. I have also read his blog for some time and also subscribed to the RSS feed. Nothing unusual there. I follow a load of people on Twitter and spend time every day keeping up with the vibrant chat and tweets of the people I follow. I wouldn’t do it otherwise. I also follow dozens of bloggers via RSS. It’s fun to read what folk say. I also try and reply to posts that provoke me to do so.

Obviously, this is relevant to the work I do but more importantly I get so much out of it. As far as I’m concerned, if you join up to Twitter, start blogging and reading blogs then you’ve joined a conversation. It shouldn’t be a chore and it isn’t compulsory.

But vitally, it isn’t about simply broadcasting. I could cite the Cluetrain Manifesto or just good old-fashioned manners. But I won’t. I’ll tell you why I’m in on it: I find it enriching. I love to find out what people are doing, enjoy the information and insight. I’m not waiting for people to come to me. I get out there and listen to what they’re saying. Different and challenging opinions are the bread and butter of social media.

I recently asked Councillor Kitcat why he only follows 21 people (those 21 are mostly Greens or the ‘usual Twitter suspects’). He is followed by more than 100 and also solicits Twitter followers on his blog.

He replied: "@wilsondan I'm trying to avoid school disco type popularity contest aspects of Twitter. Is it better to follow & ignore or not follow?"

I needless to say replied: "Idea: @jasonkitcat Why not consider & respond to the people you represent? Or are constituents just kids at a school disco, Sir? #brighton"

I though his final response was really rather telling: "@wilsondan I converse every single day by email, phone and post. Should I also subscribe to every RSS feed of residents who blog?"

To answer Kitcat’s question with another: why not? I’m following him. I read his blog posts. He is soliciting readers via his blog. And seeking followers on Flickr and YouTube. He is also seeking our votes. So why not proactively sign up to read and enjoy Brighton’s bloggers? This city is blessed with many brilliant talents, voices and characters he might enjoy. This city is home to a myriad businesses (many in his ward) who blog and tweet and converse. He may enjoy that too. I certainly do. I learn so much.

Councillor Kitcat is recompensed and required to converse with his constituents via email, phone and letter. He sought that responsibility. He is not shy about making his views known in the local newspaper. But it would be ever so classy if he also proactively listened and responded rather than just waiting for us to come to him. Why not sign up to some RSS feeds? Enjoy the tweets of the people of Brighton!

This Internet social web 2.0 thing is a conversation. It’s so much more than 'the Kitcat Channel'. It’s about being a human and using your human voice. And if anyone doesn't like that, don’t do it. But, alas, to Councillor Kitcat, we’re just kids at the school disco chattering inanely. Maybe he sees himself as the teacher, keeping us all in check?

We know some people from your company. They're pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you're hiding? Can they come out and play?

The internet should make businesses and corporations more open, more communicative and transparent. But in the 10 years of the Cluetrain Manifesto we haven’t seen a great transformation. Sure, we have business blogs opening the lid, Twitter gives us insight into what businesses are doing, but the vast majority of this communication is broadcast. Marketing messages, positive spin and highly-controlled outward bound marketing are the disappointing norm. There are some wonderful examples of where the conversation is real. But play? We’re no closer to play than ten years ago.

Companies are paranoid about what is said about them and what they say. eBay, for instance, might Twitter its quarterly results but only after it has posted a disclaimer from the legal team. Customer support reps and agents from all types of companies are still required to stick rigidly to a script. They don’t have much latitude of discretion. Off-the-cuff participation online is still rare.

The culture within a company is only one aspect of the challenge that makes proper, open communication between employees and customers possible online. Trust, cleverness and a willingness to empower are vital. Good people, cool people, who can flourish with that trust are essential. But the company culture isn’t the only factor.

The old media represents a barrier. In the testosterone-fuelled world of the old media even a lack of levity (play?) can be perceived as a lack of respect to customers. “I don’t know” is a sign of ignorance and failure. An honest, well-meant comment could be picked up and fright the market. Corporations are control freaks. Of course they’re petrified.

But we the customers are the major obstacle: we are unforgiving and combative because we’re still being let down. I’ve represented several companies online, specifically on discussion forums. My words were so tightly scrutinised by customers that they had to be carefully phrased. Memories were long: “you said three years ago... blah, blah, blah.” Questions asked with the intention of entrapment commonplace. Negativity was the norm: “you would say that, wouldn’t you?” The companies’ intentions were good, but the customers were cynical. Whilst the relationship is still broken, even pots of first-class online conversation won’t mend it. Why is this lying bastard lying to me?

Play is only possible when your guard is down. People play when they’re relaxed. There are as many cool people within companies and the tools for unleashing them have never been better or more powerful. But businesses need to traverse the trust gap before naked conversations with employees are possible and engaging. And we customers can contribute too by being a little more charitable. We need to realise that the rep isn’t the CEO, that the customer-facing agent is a human and is most likely trying their best and keen to help. When we customers are doing our bit, we can demand better from businesses. Don’t forget: they’re petrified.

Just went to bag my ticket online for the Great Escape festival in Brighton in May. It was great fun last year and the 2009 line-up is shaping up nicely.

But I was astonished by the additional charges being applied to fans buying tickets online. £9.95 in postage and processing fees. It's a fair additional whack on a ticket that costs just shy of £40. Shame on you the Great Escape and TicketWeb! Shoulda gone to Resident really.

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Stephen Fry is a geek. The second man (after Douglas Adams) in Europe to own an Apple Mac, he's long enthused about technology (ever since I was a boy) and long websited, blogged, podcasted and more recently Twittered prolifically. This is a man who has nearly 100k followers on Twitter. That's love. That's credibility.

John Prescott is 70 and rightfully proud of his recent conversion to the internet. In the past few months he's taken to 'the Facebook' with enthusiasm and verve: he told us proudly that he was going to become a granddad one Sunday afternoon and shared his brilliant wife Pauline's birthday party pics only last week.

And in the past few days both have had their personal online credibility punctured by critics. Robert Scoble accused (and later retracted) Stephen Fry of emplying a social media agency to twitter on his behalf. The agency, we are social, rebutted the accusation forcefully. Scoble apologized.

Notable British Conservative blogger Iain Dale questioned, with typical civility, whether it was actually John Prescott himself blogging and Facebooking. Prezza, in his imitable style, put the record straight on YouTube. Dale took it all back.

As a follower of Fry on Twitter and one of Prezza's friends' on Facebook, I never doubted either. Fry was too personal and frequent to be false and Prescott too sent emails that were quite simply him. In short: they were both authentic. What a shame that it was ever doubted.

Fry employs an agency to help him (and with his following who can blame him) and makes all his tweets personally.* Prescott is open that he has expertise at his disposal, but that doesn't matter because evidently the words are his own. Both spoke with their own unfiltered, personal voices. And that's all that matters. It's a great example to everybody, everywhere: be yourself.

* Except last night when he told us he was handing the reins over to his webmaster Andrew while he was speaking at the Apple Store in London. I only add this footnote because if I don't, it will be pointed out.