As I wrote last week, I was one of the privileged few to be invited to DLD 08 (thanks Katja and Simon!), which was a tremendous success, as last year. Many congratulations to Dr Hubert Burda, who had the vision to start it 4 years ago and turned it into certainly Germany’s leading conference, probably Europe’s and which has to be among the top 10 in the world.

There were loads of speakers, mainly in panel format and unusually, much mingling of speakers with the hoi poloi. Such is the quality of the invited audience, that it’s an event where big name speakers not only stick around after their slot, but they’re accessible to the audience too.

Unfortunately, many of the panels take place in two streams, so you’re forced to choose between very interesting topics, or even whether your time is better spent meeting and networking in separate hall. I found a good approach was to focus on panels which weren’t so familiar, as the chances of real learning were much higher. Sadly though, I didn’t get to see nearly as much as I wanted.

I’ll be posting more about it in clearer headlined topics. But I’ll make a couple of comments here about three subjects that don’t really fit in anywhere else.

The first is scarves. No, not a mobile tech buzz word, but those long (or short) flappy things that go round your neck. About 1 in 10 men were wearing them, which I found most odd.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing like a nice cozy scarf on a cold day, but why wear one inside in a venue that was packed to the point of unpleasantly warm at times. Sure, I get it’s a fashion/sartorial statement thing, but at the expense of making you uncomfortably hot? I’ll spare the blushes of the fashion victims (by no means all German), but this was strange.

Secondly, we had a presentation by David Silverman (no scarf for him), the animator best known for directing numerous episodes of The Simpsons. The poor man managed the worst technology mishap since George Bush fell off a Segway - he managed to not only make a Mac crash, but in front of one of the most influential audiences gathered in Germany the whole year. David made a fantastically smooth job of continuing his presentation while frantically re-booting and without skipping a beat. The man had real aplomb.

But it wasn’t Apple’s finest hour and any Microsoft executives in the audience must have been rubbing their hands gleefully, while wishing that they had filmed the incident for later release on YouTube.

Finally, Martha Stewart - yes that Martha - was due to receive the Anna Burda award, presented to women of achievement. Last year it was won by Flickr’s Catrina Fake and she presented it to Martha. The idea then was that she’d head over to where Tyler Brule, founder of both Wallpaper and Monocle (and one of the scarf wearers!) was waiting to interview her. So no speech planned or requested, just the one-on-one.

But this is a determined lady. She wanted her time in the limelight and launched into the first half of what she’d planned. Firstly, she treated us to a ceremonial unpacking of her travelling suitcase containing all her gadgets. Bizarrely, she’d packed every item, ranging from camera, various chargers, Sony Vaio, more chargers and phone, into some kind of clear plastic bag. No - I have no idea.

Then she launched into a prepared speech for about 20 minutes or so - all the while leaving Tyler sitting on the stage sweating under hot lights and almost certainly deeply regretting wearing that scarf, by the way.

The content of her speech would probably been really fascinating for her lifestyle homies and readers, but was a little beneath the audience of tech-savvy geekerati. Apparently, she blogs and takes lots of photos - this is no technophobic lady we were meant to understand. Again and again. See for yourself and bear in mind this is the edited highlights.

Finally, she graciously allowed herself to walk over to Tyler and be interviewed, by this time having thrown the timing of the packed agenda completely and all really as she wanted to tell us she took lots of photos. Tyler walked her through some questions and this could have been really entertaining if they’d had the time to do it justice.

A strange affair all round, but this is a woman who knows what she wants and does it. Or maybe it was all in protest at scarf wearing.

Anyway, I’ll be writing up some more notes in the next few days, which are more “on topic” for MobHappy. But thought you’d be interested in this “out-take” version.