The following is a guest post by Alison Wheeler, a self-confessed geek since the year dot, and now a writer and consultant on innovation, managing knowledge, and business strategy in a free world. A designer, developer and promoter of open source software, open knowledge and open content, she enjoys finding solutions to problems others insist are impossible. She blogs at alisonw.com and tweets as http://twitter.com/AlisonW. Here she covers her recent visit to the 140 Characters:

Hardship Intro and Twillionaire Stephen Fry

On November 17, @JeffPulver came to town with his 140 Characters Conference show, following in the footsteps of past 140conf events in New York and Los Angeles. Selecting the Indigo at the O2 as its venue was an interesting decision, given that the conference supplied no coffee or meals  and none of the coffee shops at the O2 opened until shortly before 9am. Considering registration was from 8am, there were a lot of people looking for their caffeine fix.  Early on it was also discovered that there was no WiFi - a little odd considering attendees would naturally want to be tweeting or heating. But then these weren't the reasons people were attending.

Stephen Fry (@stephenfry, pictured) was a big draw to the event, and he gave a wonderful -- and extended -- review of how the immediacy of 140 characters has effectively changed the world, and his as he was crowned a 'Twillionaire'

Kevin Holly on SMS text Messaging and Twitter

We were there to hear about what other people were doing with Twitter, and occasionally other short message services: the "140 characters" of the title. Indeed the most interesting presentation, for me, was from Kevin Holly (@gadget37, co-inventor of SMS text messaging) who gave us the technical background about the development of texting and just why the limit is 160 characters -- the 140 for Twitter et al is because the remainder get used for the 'from' and 'to' -- and their using 7-bit characters to squeeze them all in.

Crowdsourcing, Music, Education and 66 other Twitter Topics

Initially all the seats were filled for the sessions and the event was opened at 9am by Jeff Pulver alongside Jeffrey Hayzlett (@JeffreyHayzlett, CMO of Kodak, who sponsored the event). Pulver presented his 'State of Now' (You can find it on YouTube) and Hayzlett talked about how Kodak had made use of the crowdsourcing opportunities to improve their products and their customer service. Pulver was due to be followed by 66 other people discussing everything from music to education, news services to eBay, The Police service to dreams. It was a busy schedule and, with only the single lunchtime break, possibly too intensive for some. Many of the seats emptied after Stephen Fry as people moved to the back and sides of the hall or left for the coffee shop for their own discussions and a multitude of laptops and netbooks appeared.

London as Super Twitter Town and Community

According to Twitter, the highest concentration of their users is to be found in London. This conference had thus attracted many of what could be termed 'the usual suspects' on the London Social Media scene. In that sense, and because just about all the attendees were experienced users and promoters of the use of these services, there was a strong sense of 'preaching to the converted' which may not have been the case in New York or LA. Nonetheless there were other gems in the day, including tweeting Police in the West Midlands and the education panel.

All in all, a day to remember but not necessarily one to repeat."

Here the author of Ebay (one of the first online communities of sellers and buyers) for Dummies talks: