As I continue my journey around the country with another trip to the capital, this time for Trainer Talk live, the fact that I have a lot of travel time to kill has not escaped me. There's plenty of time to reflect, time to take a more existential stance on why I do what I do while hurtling at 125 mph in the belly of a metal snake, because there sure as damnit is not enough time in the office for calm contemplation.

Training events are especially important to me as I settle in to my position as acting editor so I can get to know the who's who in the industry, whose passions and motivations lie where. It's a good chance to 'put a face to the tweet', as the BBC's Nick Shackleton-Jones put it last week at the IITT event. I'm a big advocate of social media, and I use various types both in and outside of work; I think the argument of whether or not social media can be used constructively - for business, education, whatever - involves two ostensibly opposed groups of people who are actually saying the same thing, albeit from slightly different perspectives. Traditionalists and technophobes may see applications such as Twitter to be an interference, a cocky young turk, a fad, but, while its overwhelming popularity belies its relative youthfulness, at its core it remains an incredibly powerful tool for connecting and engaging with people, end of story. I think both advocates and pariahs would agree that there's a lot of noise out there in the twittersphere, and that needs to be cut through if it is to be used effectively. Once one does that, the world is yours to connect with.

One aspect of my job while at some of the training events is to provide a live Twitter feed for those who follow @trainingzone and are unable to make the actual event, hopefully to pull out some useful soundbites, which can perhaps be used at a later date. This approach has come under a modicum of criticism recently, mainly because the tweets come thick and fast and may dominate some people's Twitter feed (depending on how many people one follows). But for me, Twitter is a live microblogging tool and this is its best and most appropriate use. Information is there in the moment, and then it's gone as swiftly as it has arrived. Twitter has no dormant state, it is transient by nature, so activity from certain accounts will surge and lull, depending on what's going on in the account managers' lives. And @trainingzone is certainly a very active account in the month of September.