Speed test.

Spent this week at the Innotrans premier rail conference in Berlin, which has meant limited time for any extra-curricula computing nerdery but I did test something which turned out to be a bit of a shock.

Some of the stands at this event were works of art - and some were almost the size of small towns, complete with coffee shop, bar, bleacher seating and live entertainment. God knows how much these things cost but they are well received by the attendee's. Anyway a thought came to me while wandering around - there should be a competition for the best stand. To the best of my knowledge there wasn't an official one organised - would probably be far to much effort and just end up cheesing off some stand owners. So I thought I would do my own and try and record it using my new found social media tool set!

Before I go any further I must point out that this survey was NOT scientific in ANY way - entrants were selected simple along my timeline through the event and purely based on my personal 'gut' reaction at the time of passing the stand.

So the plan was, to photograph stands as I wandered around, then select a stand for an award base upon what I had come across. Photo's and award were then Tweeted to #innotrans and then later Storified into an award ceremony in a Storify story! The whole process probably only took me say 5 minutes per award to manage. The compiled and 'published' award ceremony can be fond on the following link;

http://storify.com/grandwizz/innotrans-2012-awards

Well the strange thing was that I started off doing this as a bit of fun and to see if I could generate some 'e-traffic'. Fortunately I kept the awards 'sensible' and 'clean'  - could have taken a completely different route for some of the stands if I had been so inclined believe you me.

Anyway, the 'award ceremony' was carried out on the last day with me Tweeting the final winners and then the link to the Storify site. All done from the Innotrans business lounge - fitting for an award ceremony I thought (what a great place - free wifi and all that). The shocking thing was that within seconds the story had been re-tweeted by @EURAILmag, @OfficialHitachi, @thalesgroup and @LR_Rail to over 6000 potential readers! Only slight panic set in  - until very positive comments came back - phew!

Quite a buzz!