#tdc10: Christian Payne - Documentally on capturing and listening the world and people around us

Christian has since done work for the British Council in Pakistan and Hong Kong on the back of it. But he's also done fascinating pro-am stuff recently in the election, using simple, ubiquitous tech on the road. Here, interviewing Nick Clegg on the election trail for this video.

Or here, documenting the moment he wrote off his Landrover:

The minute he posted it to Shozu, which posted to Seesmic, which autoposted to Twitter, he started receiving phone calls from people with cranes, spare cars for loan, in American sending in donations for a new Landrover, someone from the AA who looked up the number plate and sent someone along to pick up the car (Christian was a member and hadn't known).

"Social technology is like sex. It's fun to talk and read about but you can't truly comprehend it unless you do it." (George Colony, CEO, Forrester)

The more Christian shares his mistakes, problems, challenges, the more human connections he can make, the more important it becomes to make life enjoyable, helpful, profitable. He uses the time that most of us spending waiting: queues, in cars, on buses, in trains.

He uses the tech that fits the pocket or bag he has on him; a mobile phone camera provides as much quality as a pro film camera that costs tens of times more, doesn't fit in a pocket and whose quality, on the web, is not demonstrably noticeable.

While tweeting the PM's speech on October 13th, 2008, his mobile phone was getting messages up online (through twitter) about a minute ahead of Reuters.

Key to getting your own messages out there is finding the nodes who can help you connect to more, wider, larger audiences. When Christian and Bletchley Park wanted to get more folk to know about what the Park offers, Stephen Fry was more than willing to come for a walkaround, and a quick one-minute audioboo (though not enough time for an 'interview' - there is a difference).

Key to seeing what is going on out there is listening well, and that means filtering (use lists, keyword, tag searches to find people close to you, at the same events, in the same industry) and searching (using http://www.kurrently.com/ is good for searching Facebook and Twitter).