So a few hours ago, as part of the ever-phenomenal Thinking Digital conference, I took part in a demo presentation in which I was hooked up to a headset which allowed me to control things with my mind alone. It’s not every day you get to say that, and it seemed like a good idea to write down some thoughts.

We've been evangelising about the power of captions and subtitles for SEO for a long time now. A closed caption file is a form of text file, after all, and it stands to reason that storing what is effectively a text transcript of your video on your site is likely to make the video content more accessible to search engines. We've seen many of our clients' videos rise up the search listings substantially after being captioned, so we've been convinced of the theory, and our clients have been more than happy.

But it's been hard to turn up concrete evidence to prove that captions and subtitles affect SEO... until now. In the last few months it's become clear that YouTube's search results are visibly affected by the caption and subtitle tracks on certain videos, and if you don't believe us take a peek at this image.

We've been big fans of reCAPTCHA since we first saw it in 2009. By the time Luis von Ahn had finished speaking about it at Thinking Digital in 2010 - receiving a standing ovation from some of the awestruck crowd - we'd vowed to one day feature it on one of our sites. So we're pretty excited to finally be able to feature reCAPTCHA on our blog.

So, we finally got some downtime to sort out the long-promised overhaul of the internetsubtitling.com blog.

We're very worried about the Digital Economy Bill here at internetsubtitling.com. Aside from being based on almost entirely flawed and unjust principles, it also carries a lot of details with it which could seriously harm our business and others like it. With that in mind, and with parliament about to start a rushed and cursory debate on the bill this afternoon, I sent the following letter to my MP, David Clelland. You're welcome to use any or all of it in a similar letter to your own MP.

It's all gone a bit quiet. Forgive us, we've had an extremely busy winter. But we're still here - this blog is being slightly revamped at the moment and we'll relaunch it in the next few weeks....

Appearing at the Thinking Digital conference had a number of knock-on effects for internetsubtitling.com, the first and the most exquisitely badly behaved of which was that I ended up in the same room as Marcus Romer.

As well as being a director, producer and all-round theatre good guy, Marcus is artistic director at Pilot Theatre. Pilot is based at the York Theatre Royal, and specialises in pulling off all the challenging or crazy projects that furrow the brows of more mainstream theatres. It also organises Shift_Happens, a TED-style high-intensity conference which looks at the potential impact of digital and web technology on the arts.

Yesterday I made a fairly standard approach to a potential client, asking whether they’d be interested in subtitles or captions for their video content. We’re talking about an organisation set up by the UK government, with many dozens of videos on their site, so I figured maybe they’d be interested. At worst I’d get one of the usual reasons for not wanting to talk to me – worldwide recession, not a priority, yada yada yada. But no, this time I heard a new one.

  Ian Aspin and Erin Maguire were roaming around at Shift_Happens 2.0, interviewing and filming the unwary. They were kind enough to point their camera in my direction for a while....

We’ve been in the press a fair bit recently, which is always exciting.

Those of us who use Twitter were pretty animated about Thinking Digital, generating a thriving backchannel via the #tdc hashtag which filtered and refined ideas alongside what was happening onstage.

Codeworks, the organisers of Thinking Digital, do a fine job of booking world-class speakers and whipping up hype beforehand, and as the conference began last Wednesday I was really hoping it would live up to its promise. In the event I needn’t have worried. Far from over-egging the pudding it turns out the pre-event hype was actually pretty conservative, and that the pudding was far eggier than claimed.

The Thinking Digital conference ran from 13th to 15th May, filling the Sage Gateshead with all kinds of wonderment and insanity. I was there for all three days, and now my brain is threatening to leak out of my nostrils a little bit.