How do you listen?

I’m absorbing a panel at the excellent Defrag conference in Denver, and thanks to the best wifi I’ve ever actually had at a conference, combined with an audience of some of most socially wired people around, finding myself exercising a learning paradigm that I’ve often experienced but rarely been able to enjoy to this degree.

In the last two sessions, I’ve looked up the company websites and blogs of several speakers, subscribed to multiple RSS feeds from people I’ve met here, added several people to my social networks, posted a question to the room via twitter, joined a Facebook group (no you can’t join) on a thread of interest created at the conference, posted a clever comment on the wall there, and discovered and followed a twitter account set up to comment the conference. After posting this, I might even link to it there.

What’s interesting to me about this is that I don’t usually do orthogonal multi-tasking well — and I don’t usually take kindly to people opening up laptops in my meetings either. But this has had the opposite effect, enhancing my experience of listening and thinking about things that are being said, rather than distracting from it. I’ve stayed completely off of email and IM and outside distractions (despite having facebook and twitter tabs open).

So it’s sort of like an IRC backchannel - only I get to decide who’s in it and how I want to flavor the experience in terms of tools. Come to think of it, I haven’t used any of the three quasi-official collaboration tools offered through the conference organizers, which validates (for me) two key themes of this show so far — that open standards and identities are going to continue to enable users to drive increasingly customized and personal experiences around idea sharing and group collaboration, and that there’s plenty more to do in the group / enterprise collaboration space.

There’s probably something interesting that could be done to enable the exchange of identities - something like what Chris Pirillo does for Gnomedex with OPML, only less “all or none”.

Defrag, and the people attending it, are changing the way I listen. How do you listen?