Today sees the launch of this year’s Futuresonic festival in Manchester. Over the years it has mainly been known for its stellar lineup of experimental musicians. This year the one and only Philip Glass is making an appearance among many other big names. However, much more interesting from the point of view of 14sandwiches is the Social Technologies Summit.

Over two days a wide range of big names in Social Media thinking and practice will be speaking. It really is exciting to have such a big event on my doorstep as people involved in some of my favourite initiatives are going to be there. Ewan McIntosh of 4IP (Channel 4’s innovation fund that helped launch AudioBoo), Alfie Dennen (who organised the Britglyph project) and Selene Kolman of Latitude-beating (in execution, if not user numbers) geolocation network Bliin are all going to be giving presentations.

Normally, with a full time job, I can’t get to this kind of thing. This time I’m lucky enough to actually be involved in the event. Over the past few weeks I’ve been training a group of young people aged 18 to 25 in Social Media reporting skills. I’ll write a post about this process soon but the Futuresonic Festival Rangers, as we’ve called them, are now ready. Armed with Nokia N85 phones they’ll be tweeting, photographing and video streaming their way around the festival.

Given my ever-growing love of FriendFeed, all their output is being aggregated into their FriendFeed account which you can find here: http://friendfeed.com/futr09rangers

Beyond the Festival Rangers’ work, I’ll be liveblogging many of the Social Technologies Summit’s events using FriendFeed. Using Twitter for a live blog just creates annoyance for anyone who doesn’t want to know about the event. With FriendFeed, interaction is so much easier and others can join in in a structured way.  So, if you are interested in the speakers at the Summit subscribe to the Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit FriendFeed Group. There’s a small group of subscribers at present but they’re interacting, which bodes well for the next few days.

I’ll post a retrospective of the event next week here at 14sandwiches.