“[The premise that…] people won’t pay for content is a myth propagated by big media. The reality is that people won’t pay for their media anymore,” he said.

Hammersley said that consumers will pay for quality, crafted content pertinent to their personal interests.

“Content publishers need to stop chasing numbers and pursue quality, elegance and craftsmanship instead. Digital is enabling interesting stuff to be made [and distributed] at low cost to small audiences,” he added.

Russell Davies and Ben Terrett from the Really Interesting Group may have cracked the means for content producers in the digital environment to publish their work in a physical newspaper format.

The duo is behind the Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008 project, a beautifully designer newspaper of content drawn from around their digital networks. The publication was so admired that it has inspired a Flickr group.

Davies and Terrett have now raised funding from Channel 4’s seed fund 4iP to develop a tool to enable anyone make the transition from content on screen to a printed format.

“The Beatles themselves were entrepreneurs [....] They developed an Elevator Pitch (‘like Elvis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry, only better…’) found a Mentor (their manager Brian Epstein), and then a First Customer, (producer George Martin, who signed them to EMI).”

During the 1980s Southon co-founded The Instruction Set, a computer services company, which he later sold to what is now Cap Gemini. He worked with 17 start-up ventures during the 1990s, two of which, Riversoft and Micromuse, later listed on the stock exchange. He writes a column for the Saturday FT on entrepreneurship and delivers over 100 presentations every year.

Southorn is also an experienced broadcaster and has released over 80 podcast-friendly interviews with famous industrialists, entrepreneurs and business experts. Tune in here to hear him in conversation with Allan Leighton, Sir Robin Saxby, SpinVox’s Christina Domecq and Nixon McInnes’ Will McInnes, amongst others.

Adrian Hon from Six to Start explained to delegates at Thinking Digital how his team took six stories and presented them in innovative digital ways over six weeks attracting 250,000 readers and healthy discussion via an online forum.

The project won in the Experimental Category and Judge’s Best of Show in the 12th Annual SXSW Interactive Web Awards.

The 21 Steps by Charles Cummins
A spy story using narrative tied to locations plotted on physical maps

Slice by Toby Litt
A dialogue written in 140 character chunks and distributed via two Twitter feeds

Fair Tales by Kevin Brooks
User information entered via a web interface is built into a fairy tale story

Your Place or Mine by Nicci French
A story written in hour long chunks live in real time over the course of a five day period

Hard Times by Matt Mason and Nicolas Fenton
Charles Dickons’ Hard Times updated for the digital age in an infographic format

The (Former) General by Mohsin Hamid
A hyperlinked chose-your-own-adventure story

The highlight of his session was multi-touch platforms that combine displays and touch interfaces such as Microsoft Surface to combine the physical space with the digital. He also covered electronic paper, screen technologies and electronic paper.

I originally discovered Jonny via a lecture at TED in April 2008 where he presented his low cost Minority Remote-style wiimote hack. Delegates at Thinking Digital were treated to a quick snapshot of this project.

Watch the original video.

She’s part of the team working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to create the very early universe to test fundamental theories of particle physics in search of the origin mass, anti-matter and dark energy.

The cornerstone of the work of the 2,000 physicists at CERN is the search for the Higgs boson, an elementary particle, nicknamed the God particle.

The LHC is a massive piece of equipment that has been built in a circular tunnel 27km in circumference underground in Geneva. Unfortunately it failed a week or so after launch. When it’s back online in September it will create electron beams that carry the stored energy of half a lightening bolt and the team will be able to continue its work.

CERN has created GridPP, a distributed computing grid across 17 UK institutions. Once the LHC is back online, the grid will harness 10,000 PCs to process data from experiments.

An entertaining interview on stage at Thinking Digital (#tdc) between entrepreneur and FT columnist Mike Southon and Red Bull’s former-UK CEO Harry Drnec on the marketing strategy he developed for Red Bull.

• Identify – segment market audiences – in the case of Red Bull people that burn the candle at both ends
• Find them – determine channels to audiences
• Touch – provide products to audience when they need them – Red Bull did this via experiential marketing
• Thrill them – ensure product delivers and delivers on its promise

This simple strategy increased sales from three million cans in 1996 to 300 million cans in 2006 and combined with strong brand and channel management enabled Red Bull to maintain premium pricing.

Drnec is now CEO of the Broadband Computer Company developing a hassle free computer due to be launched later this year.

He’s keen to encourage us to turn away from the screen and do interesting stuff in the real work. “Technologies should be using digital to tackle big issues not throwing sheep around on screen,” he said.

During his conference presentation he explored the alignment of social issues and technology. He left the audiences with two inspiring social enterprise projects in which he’s involved.

• Social Innovation Camp is a project whereby technologists are invited to submit ideas to create better solutions to social problems in the real world. The best ideas are selected and developed over the course of a weekend by invited technologists. The next event is in Scotland 19 to 21 June.

• The School of Everything is a community that helps learners find local teachers in all subjects, worldwide. Teachers register online and create a personal page giving information on their lessons, the qualifications offered and the format in which they teach. 15,000 learners have signed up.

Miller challenged the audience to use technology as an enabler to create new social enterprise models. As Tim O’Reilly said Work on Stuff that Matters.

I’m heading to Thinking Digital tomorrow and Friday at the Sage in Gateshead. It’s bogglingly billed as TED meets SXSW on the Tyne. The speaker line-up is impressive and the topic areas are inspiring. Give me a shout if you’re attending otherwise follow #tdc for updates from the event.