== Edinburgh : Part 2 ==
[ Tuesday, 23 May 2006 ]
It was time for the long-awaited opening plenary.. Well for me, I was more excited about seeing Tim Berners-Lee rather than the plenary itself.. LOL.. Tim's the inventor of the World Wide Web.. Sitting there seeing him in the flesh was so surreal.. For a guy with his stature, he didn't seem to have any air around him and he looked like a very approachable guy which was pretty refreshing.. To quote D, his opening speech sounded like "a guy talking to his friend in a pub"! Don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but I liked it anyway :D
Afterwards, there was the plenary speech by David Brown, chairman of Motorola.. He said "the device formerly known as the mobile phone" is becoming the "fourth medium" after newspapers, television and the Internet.. He also pointed out some amazing figures.. Apparently back in the 80s, the industry believed there was a worldwide market for 900,000 mobile phones..
"Now, 900,000 phones are sold every 19 hours. We were 46,000 per cent wrong."
That afternoon, I went to my first ever conference session.. I wanted to listen to the invited speakers for "Successful web based business - Web Sites" so I went to the third floor where all the auditoriums were.. As I went into one of the auditoriums, I listened to Shawn Burns from Wunderman, a leading web advertising company and Dominique Vidal from Yahoo.. What I found quite interesting was that the number of blogs on the Net doubles every five months.. They also said there was a big growth potential for web advertising which I thought was pretty ironic considering how most web users simply despise the amount of pop-up ads we've got at the moment..
Later when the session ended, I was hit by a revelation.. I found out that the session I attended was called "Web for Advertising".. I went to the wrong auditorium! No wonder they were going on and on about advertising.. Duh.. *slaps forehead*
After lunch, I went to the correct auditorium and monitored the "Impact of the Web on Media & Entertainment" session.. One of the invited speakers was Daniel Harris, the founder of the Kendra Initiative.. His presentation was mainly on his project for channelling media direct from content providers to consumers.. I was feeling particularly bold that day so I raised my hand to ask a question..
"What's in it for the consumer?"
"You can support the content providers directly and feel good about yourself."
Hmm.. Considering that I come from a country where consumers believe in piracy, I don't think I empathize with that :P
Later on, I went for the "Third Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem" which was quite popular.. The room was overflowing with people and I had to share a seat with A, another volunteer.. However, I found it to be direly boring.. There were loads of stuff on graphs and data mining numbers and I thought it was too detailed for my liking.. I guess I was looking for the bigger picture.. Or maybe I was just plain bored.. What I didn't like was the Q and A session at the end of each presentation.. It looked as if the audience would turn into vultures just to attack the presenters till they fall over and die.. Apparently this is what other people call "academic debate".. But the interesting bit was when these two people sitting next to me were discussing the slides, oblivious to the fact that their voices could be heard all over the room.. People were shooting piercing glances towards our direction and I hung my head really low, wishing I could turn invisible :P
Went to have an early dinner that night.. Before we left, I couldn't find my coat despite searching all over EICC.. So I assumed that it's lost together with my purse and ATM card inside it :S
After dinner, we went back the flats and watched Sweet Home Alabama.. And I found a cloakroom tag hidden down in the depths of my jeans pocket.. Which meant my coat was still in EICC.. With my purse.. Yes, I am the biggest doofus in the world.. *slaps forehead again*
[ Wednesday, 24 May 2006 ]
Today I attended the technical plenary panel.. Right before it started, the chair for next year's conference did a lucky draw and one of the volunteers won! It was a meal voucher for two at Banff, Canada where WWW2007 will be held.. I guess that friend of mine will have no choice but to go there again next year ;)
That morning, I was in charge of monitoring the "Fighting search spam" refereed papers session.. The chair was Ziv Bar-Yossef from Israel.. Then in the afternoon, I monitored the "Languages for Developing Multimodal Applications" tutorial.. The actual presenter fell ill a couple of days before the tutorial, so Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon, General Manager of Microsoft Research Asia stepped in.. He's such an amazing guy.. Despite the short notice, he managed to come up with a comprehensive 100-page PowerPoint presentation.. No small feat!
Unfortunately, I got bored (again) and since there was another volunteer working in that room, I took the liberty of popping in and out of the other rooms to see what's on at the moment.. I went to see H present his paper and then I saw the developers' track on microformats, vCards and vCalendars..
Later that evening, we went back to the flats - after retrieving my coat and purse.. LOL.. This was when me, Mr. G and Mr. W got into this heated discussion about the distance of a geostationary satellite from Earth.. I overestimated the radius of Earth by 10^5 kilometres.. Needless to say, it wasn't exactly my finest moment.. Mr. G retorted that I should know how to do proper estimations considering I'm going to be a teacher soon..
Oh crud, he's right :|
Afterwards, we all went to Edinburgh Castle for the welcome reception.. It was very windy at the top, but the view was breathtaking.. You could see the whole of Edinburgh.. Mr. W and I practically stayed in front of the kitchen doorway and every time a waitress came through with a tray of food, it was wiped clean by the crowd even before she could move out of the room :D
Later we saw the crown jewels.. Afterwards, I saw displays of networking at its best.. But the highlight of the day was the picture we took with Tim and Wendy Hall, our Head of School.. Sigh.. I can die happy now :)
::
NHA at 11:59 PM ::
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