My first WWW conference

Last week in Edinburgh, I attended my first World-Wide Web Conference.
This year's WWW 2006 was held in the convention center in downtown
Edinburgh, U.K.  Next year will be in Banff, Canada, then 2008 in Beijing,
China; 2011 in Bangalore, India.  Locations for 2009 and 2010 are not
yet decided.  This year's registration fee was horrendously expensive:
a full registration and a complementary one for a student cost 100 pounds!
Next year's fee is expected to come down a bit.
The reception at Edinburgh Castle offered only wines and o'deuvres
and was 50 pounds (absolute rip-off!).

From our group, we had two workshop papers,
one on IPTV and the other on Weblogging Ecosystem.
Each workshop was attended by 30 to 60 people; cozy,
just as workshops should be.  We got some good feedback
that we plan to incorporate in our full paper versions.

The conference had 11 parallel tracks,
numerous workshops, and poster sessions.  The acceptance ratio
was just above 10%, but the paper quality was mixed, varying
between tracks.  Each track has a separate TPC,
and chairs of all tracks get together to decide on
the final selection of papers.  As it's a rather new area to me,
some talks sounded very alien to my ears (e.g. the panel session
by Tim Berners-Lee on Wed.)  I could also see that evaluation
in web technology is not easy, as data sets are so diverse
and metrics of interest are not absolute.

A talk for a refereed paper was allocated 30 minutes, 10 minutes more than
at a typical technical conference.  Thus talks were given
in a leisurely manner, with ample time for motivation and Q&A.
However, such loose time scheduling must be one of the factors to
11 parallel tracks.

Exhibition booths were set up by Google, Microsoft, Infosys, etc.
Memorable giveaways?  Hmm, let me think.  None.