Two recent visitors to Tyneside were American new media artists Jon Winet and Margaret Crane. They came to soak up the culture and talk to as many people as they could.
In the autumn, Jon Winet quizzed me over a coffee about the North-East's lively entertainment scene. He took my photograph in the Bigg Market, we shook hands and went our separate ways.
Many others had a similar experience. Then, at the end of July, I had a letter telling me that the new media project entitled Monument, "that you so graciously contributed to", was about to launch online.
I had forgotten all about our friendly meeting but it seemed that something useful had come of it.
It now becomes clear that Winet and Crane were all eyes and ears as they travelled around in the company as hosts from Northern Arts and the Newcastle-based arts commissioning outfit Locus Plus.
They walked along both banks of the Quayside, visited the Byker Wall, housing estates and university campuses. They pored over documents and archives. According to Simon Herbert, of Locus Plus, Jon Winet was very taken with Newcastle United. The artists were taken to a match and revelled in the sight of so many supporters in Magpie shirts.
They experienced Newcastle as a party city, joining evening drinkers in the Bigg Market.
Monument is the first new media commission (and for `new media' read computers) by Locus Plus, run by Jon Bewley and Simon Herbert, who have been initiating adventurous and ground-breaking art projects from an upstairs office in High Bridge, Newcastle, for more than a decade.
Monument now occupies a website, launched to coincide with the early weeks of the Baltic centre for contemporary art, and is due to evolve in forthcoming years.
"We are making art out of sociology," says Winet. "It's not a documentary, although we use those techniques. Monument is lyrical and personal. It's open to interpretation."
Simon Herbert recalls: "What they decided to do was to create a website about the changing city of Newcastle (and perhaps we should add Gateshead) with relation to economic regeneration via cultural enterprises."
The pair have undertaken similar initiatives in America. A recent year-long project, Democracy - The Long Campaign, focused on the 2000 US presidential elections.
The Newcastle website, Monument, is a mosaic of words and pictures. It's a series of windows into how outsiders see us and how we see ourselves. Perhaps the most interesting heading to click on is The Evidence of Change which provides a random selection of quotes from council reports and strategies, excerpts from literature and the views of a wide range of people.
Cards relating to the website were produced by designer Lee Callaghan to distribute in pubs, clubs, libraries and other public places. The idea, says Simon Herbert, was that it should reach as many people as possible, including those without access to a computer.
Locus Plus refer to Monument as "a selective portrait of a metropolitan area in transition".
It wasn't commissioned because Newcastle and Gateshead were bidding to be European Capital of Culture in 2008 but it can't do the North-East bid any harm. It is both innovative and all-embracing.
The project is designed to run over several years, constantly being updated and eventually becoming more interactive as technology develops.
It might have been made by Americans but it shows a lively, forward-looking community with a sense of history and optimism.
* The website can be found on www.locusplus.org.uk/monument.
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