Digifest @ Dynamic Earth, 26-28 August

Yes, it’s that sunny (ahem) time of year that everyone in Europe descends on Edinburgh, and everyone actually in Edinburgh runs for their lives and clamps a pillow down over their ears.

No, honest, we love Festivals season with all of our shrivelled hearts, most especially for all the crazy new stuff it brings. For every dull comedian using their stand-up as therapy, there’s a bizarre sketch show done in a John Lewis bathroom. But what’s a fest-er to do when they want to bury themselves in their little digital screen and get psyched by something new?

Sadly, you do have to leave your flat for this one. But I promise it’ll be worth it. Taking over the under-used Our Dynamic Earth for the weekend of August 26th is the Turing Festival, a mass gathering of the biggest nerd names in the business, all of whom are forming a mini-technology festival this year at the end of the Festival season. No nerd-based hot topic in the digital arena will be left un-obsessed: social media, music, film, interaction techniques, and several hundred hashtags.

The theme this year is Creative Destruction, which is all about the highfalutin premise of taking society apart and rebuilding it in a new, digitally imbued form. Speakers from the infamous Pirate Bay, and the less-infamous but still awesome CERN, will go over how new technology is changing us, and how we change it. More entertaining, of course, will be the numerous displays and demos of crazy games, technologies and interaction techniques.

Left cold by all that high-minded talk? Let’s get your mind back firmly in the gutter then. One of the clever innovations to come out of Edinburgh Festivals is meetup website Festafriend.com, where users can invite completely strangers to go with them to a Fringe show, maybe to take advantage of a 2-for-1 deal, maybe to meet a new friend, and maybe just to see if anyone else is as interested in Ladyboys of Bangkok as you are. The site takes advantage of whole bunch of strangers all in town at once, lost, confused, surrounded by buskers, and needing a friend. Aww.

Best of luck this month – see all you digital types on the other side.