Yesterday I got a invited to a Manchester Digital Development Agency (MDDA) session called “Surveying 2.0 Digital Technologies, Market Intelligence and Social Media.”

The event had a strong academic theme, with keynote speaker and professor of sociology at The University of York, Roger Burrows explaining how academia has woken up to the masses of data available in the commercial world, and is using it to evaluate and predict social trends.

Although Burrows believes that access to this data could revolutionise academia, he was keen to advise caution about the pooling of data from separate sources for commercial benefit.

(A ‘fun’ example of the scary future he envisaged can be seen on YouTube).

The recurring theme of the day was about privacy of information. As this Internet thing is not going to go away, issues over privacy represent the biggest threat to the development and implementation of technology.

Although every community site you join has T&Cs, there are few people who check them, fewer who object – and many who don’t really care.

Protecting yourself online is something that we all need to take as seriously as we do offline. The average fraudster can get just about everything they need from your Facebook site, so do take care what you share.

A more interesting question for practitioners comes from who owns the information you put on your social sites: you or the organisation that owns the site?

Deactivate your Facebook account, and they retain all your data about you. Your name. Your friends. Your pictures. Everything. Check the T&Cs if you don’t believe me.

The best part of the day was the parallel breakout session on the State of 2008 by the ever-so-funny double act of David Bird from MMU Business School and Mike Ryan of Idaho.

The big questions debated included:

• Is 2008 the year for mobile advertising? (No – but we’re getting much closer).
• Is our fast-paced technology-enabled life about to get faster? (Yes – but we could expect a slow down in 2011).
• Does the Government already mash-up our personal data to keep an eye on us? (Er . . . ).

After the session, Bird and I shared a pint with two chaps from the newly-bought Multimap.

The world was put to rights, myths were exposed, truths were unleashed and the future speculated upon.