Such amplification takes place in the context of intent to make the most of the intellectual content, discussion, networking, and discovery initiated by the event through the process of sharing with co-attendees, colleagues, friends and wider informed publics.
[2] A paper by Haider and others[3] illustrates how amplified conferences are becoming mainstream in a discussion on "how social media have been employed as part of the project, particularly around event amplification".
As described by Guy in the Ariadne ejournal[4] the term is not a prescriptive one, but rather describes a pattern of behaviors which initially took place at IT and Web-oriented conferences once WiFi networks started to become available at conference venues and delegates started to bring with them networked devices such as laptops and, more recently, PDAs and mobile phones.
For the latter, the printed proceedings will be the main record, but for an amplified event this record is distributed across many media and takes in a wider range of content types, including the papers, videos of the presentations (for example on YouTube), the slides (e.g. on Slideshare), photos of the event (Flickr), interaction between participants (Twitter), reflections and comments (blogs), etc.
The amplified conference represents an example of changing practice in digital scholarship.