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Yesterday, I got invited to the logitech magic event in Belgium together with some other bloggers. We rode out to Arquennes about 30 minutes from Brussels in Henegouwen. On arrival we were greeted with a glass of champagne and a short explanation of @wimwauters.

We got a tour around all the different products and in the mean time, there was a contest organized. I saw some nice products, but the most are not suited for me, because I have a fondness of the keyboards and mice/trackpads from Apple. The keys are just nicer from apple then any other keyboard I have used. However the accessoires for the ipad were very interesting, sadly enough the most interesting ones, like the keyboard cover are not suited for my iPad 1. But I can understand why a company developing products for Apple lines, are developing for the current versions alone.

The contest had a pretty interesting take, because Logitech and Hill and Knowlton anticipated that we would cheat. So they had a guess question included, which was how many tweets with the logitechmagic tag would be posted between 20 and 22h during the evening. As everybody was working together on finding the answers to the questions this actually was the only relevant question to receive the prices.

The range of prices was impressive, there was a surround system with a value of 350 euro to mice of 30 euro. But at least everybody got a price. I managed to get a set of Logitech 600vi in-ear phones. I’m currently testing them and I have to say the are amazingly great. These earphones are from the ultimate ear line, which is the same product line where a lot of professional musician are wearing headphones from during their concerts. The pair Sara and I got have a price value of 109 euro, which for me is very steep. That price means I would have never bought them myself, because I have a very bad track record with headphones. They tend to lay around and get tangled, ripped, get loose connections and so on.

These seem very nicely and sturdy designed, so we’ll see how they handle my abuse in the long run. The sound experience is quite impressive. I get a wide range of tones without any distortion or scrambling. The nice part is that there is a whole range of foam and plastic tips so you can choose the ones that fit your ear very nicely. I have a rather small ear channel and most tips don’t fit my ears, but the ones with the logitech ear phones actually fit my ear quite comfortable. I’m wearing them already several hours in a row, without getting any problems with having them falling out of my ear or without any discomfort. So my initial experience with these in-ear phones is very positive. So thanks a lot Logitech for a quite expensive goodie of good quality.

Last night Canvas aired the third episode of BBC‘s internet documentary The Virtual Revolution. The virtual revolution was an an open and collaborative production, which encouraged the web audience to help shape the series. But not only that is what made the experience interactive, during the TV-show people were encouraged to tweet and start a discussion about the subject of that evening. Canvas does the same and even has a web only discussion panel after every episode. Although hugely interesting, I’m not going to talk about it, you can check it out yourself at the Canvas-website or on twitter with the hashtag #virtualrevolution

While following the tweets I noticed that a lot of people are very naive about their data online. They seem to think that you can hide yourself forever behind a screenname and that facebook is evil, because of their privacy settings. Although I don’t always agree with the policy of facebook, you won’t hear me say that they are the only evil on today’s web.

At a certain point in the discussion someone, whom I’m not going to name, said, I don’t use my name on the web, so it will be very difficult to find out who I am. To prove that it’s definitely not only facebook that has a lot of data about you, I started by looking to the person’s twitter account, there was a .be domain listed, I looked at the registry data for the domain. I found out a name but not yet the one I needed. By coupling that name to his nickname in google, I found within 7 minutes his real name, location, profession, likes and marriage status. This all without the use of facebook.

I think, most people don’t realize what they are sharing and how easy it is to find that data. From the moment you are connected to the internet you are sharing a lot of information. You get personalized ads according to your search query, content of your mail, webpage you are visiting, location you are, … Everything you do on the web is recorded somewhere, somehow. Not only on the web btw, just think what’s possible with fidelity cards or your bank card.