Last week we were very well looked after at the 2009 Thinking Digital conference at the Sage, Gateshead.

It was an amazing event, well done team Codeworks! As well as meeting lots of old friends and making lots of new ones, we came away with a load of new insights and answers to questions we didn’t realize we had.

Here 19 of our favorites:

1. You are less complex than your lunch. The rice genome is many times more complex than a human - Matt Ridley, author of Genome
2. Social Media isn’t actually that social - Stowe Boyd, The /Messengers
3. Newspapers can be easily put together in small numbers - Russell Davies & Ben Terrett
4. Animation is the best way of showing how data changes with time - Hans Rosling via videolink from Stockholm
5. When 2 drums and a cymbal fall off a cliff they actually do go ‘ba-boom tish’ - Tom Scott
6. Elections are won by swing voters - Bob Baskin, Spotlight Analysis
7. Don’t fight pirates, compete with them! - Matt Mason, author of The Pirates Dilemma
8. The world’s problems are more likely to be solved by us rather than the politicians - Paul Miller, School of Everything
9. The Beatles were a template for entrepreneurship. The right team, with the correct mentor - Mike Southon, The Financial Times
10. Richard Branson answers questions from the public directly and Virgin are making a moves in the social arena - Alex Hunter, Virgin Group
11. People trust blogs more than print media, and they should. Blogs are more trustworthy - Dan Lyons, Newsweek Magazine
12. Microsoft are creating an impressive but loud and very dangerous 3D projection using plasma - Johnny Chung Lee, Microsoft
13. Someone created the smell of communism in West Germany - Chandler Burr, The New York Times
14. Pleo is the new Furby and we want one - Caleb Chung, Toymaker & Creator of the Furby & Pleo
15. Be nice to people and build a network - Tara Hunt, author of The Whuffie Factor
16. When doing any public speaking, take a conehead, some plastic balls, table tennis bats and a siren - Darius Pocha, Enable Interactive
17. If your content isn’t being bit-torrented, then it’s not that popular - Ben Hammersley, Wired Magazine UK
18. The BBC think ‘The North’ is anywhere outside of London where people eat fish and chips. But Kerstin Mogull handled the questions thrown at her brilliantly
19. We don’t want to miss Thinking Digital 2010

If you missed out this year, tickets for Thinking Digital 2010 have already gone on sale - and as it was sold out last time, we recommend you get in there early.