Marc Smith’s opening keynote on Wednesday morning was excellent. I’m really excited by the visualisation tools that he showed for mapping the Usenet community. It’s not that I’m interested in Usenet but by the possibility of finding a way to visually represent the various groups and communities that I’m involved with. We get so used to looking at tabular table that we forget the power of visualisation. There is a paper on TreeMaps that I really must read later on.

I had lunch with some people who seemed to be quite surprised that I enjoyed the talk. I may be actively involved in the Perl community but I really like to find out about new technology – even if Microsoft wrote it.